LIEBERMAN - American SH Story - Influence of Locality and Development

THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY
THE AMERICAN
SHORT STORY
A
Study of the Influence of Locality in its Development
BY
ELIAS LIEBERMAN, PH.D.
"Take civilization from this soil and there will remain to the inhabitants only war, the chase, gluttony, drunken ness. Smiling love, sweet poetic dreams, art, refined and nimble thought, are for the happy shores of the Mediter ranean. Here the barbarian, ill housed in his mud hovel, who hears the rain pattering whole days among the oakleaves what dreams can he have, gazing upon his mud pools and his sombre sky?" TAINE in English Literature.
THE EDITOR RIDGEWOOD, NEW JERSEY

1912
COPYRIGHT,
1912,
THE EDITOR COMPANY
TO MY MOTHER
255789
FOREWORD
A FEW years ago the expectant critic used to scan
coming of the "American the wonder of our new novel," in whose pages nationality was to find a worthy elucidation. From that moment of achieved national consciousness our Somehow the ar real literature was to begin. rival of the book seems to be deferred, and our
the horizon
for the
critics are less

it.
sanguine in their prophecies about In so far as they try for larger interpretation of our national spirit, our writers of fiction still
fail in certainty fall
and
definite aim,
and commonly
American into conventionality or jingoism. fiction at its best is mainly an affair of localities.
It is the story of New England or Louisiana, of the corn lands of Dakota, or the mining towns of the Sierras, or. the snows of Alaska, or, it may be, of
the
crowded realism of the manifold
life
of
New
York
City. of vivid cross-sections of the life of particular lo

calities.
From
it all
we
receive a succession
American
acter
Consciously or unconsciously, therefore, fiction has taken the form of special

local environment.
studies of the reaction between individual char
and
This interest of locality has

vii
made
the decisive
viii
FOREWORD
opportunity of the short story, which, as a literary type, with its characteristic emphasis upon "situa
tion,"
is
thus far the distinctive contribution of

to literature.
America
Perhaps, after the host of short-story tellers have searched out the secret of
every hamlet and byway, there may come those who, on a larger canvas may attempt weightier things
successfully. Perhaps so; but they will certainly not neglect the harvest of their predecessors; and it must be emphasized that we no longer consider the short story as a primary school to the novel, or its writer as a novelist in knickerbockers. The short story has a being and an end in and
itself,
its
independent future
is safe.
Dr. Lieberman has hit precisely upon the study of locality in its influence upon the American short" story for the theme of his valuable study. Un
plored,
deterred by the vastness of the material to be ex he has brought enthusiasm and sound
to the analysis of the precise debt, which, a judiciously chosen series of representative instances, the American short story owes to lo Himself a writer of short stories, as well cality. as a student of literature in the better Dr.
method
in
sense,
Lieberman has known how to give his treatment both practical worth and Writers of readability. what Dr. Lieberman calls the "local short story" will find their aims and some of their specific problems defined more significantly than in any ex
isting study of this precise subject.
It is a singular
FOREWORD
fact that the short story, in spite of its
ix
extension, has so far attracted
Readers of the short story will find in the book an interpretation of certain
elements of American literary tendency that can
immense few serious students. and who of us is not
not fail to be suggestive. The work will be of much value therefore as a work of reference for
the general reader as well as for the special student.
ARCHIBALD L. BOUTON.
New York
April
University,
1912.
Department of English.
2,
INTRODUCTION
NEVER before in the history of our literature has The there been so great a demand for fiction. of our people through a system of general literacy
free education has created a great reading public.
Whether the cause of the demand for fiction on their part is a desire to escape from the humdrum, cares of life, or a tendency to follow an intellectual line of least resistance, or an effort to batten an or imagination starved by a narrow industrialism
commercialism, the fact remains that works of fic tion are a very desirable commodity. The fiction worker, the author, who meets this call
for his wares
terial.
The
constantly searching for new ma public is ever hungry and he must

is
ever feed.
replenished.
His stock-in-trade must be constantly He draws from his own experiences
mainly, if he wishes the stories he writes to be life Seldom does he stray far afield like and true. because he feels that he can not give his work the
convincing touches
first \
it
needs without a profound
of his subject matter. iXfhus in our novels and in our short stories
hand knowledge
we
get a great deal of what
is
called
"local
color."
story
is
given a unique setting,

xi
let
us say in
xii
INTRODUCTION
49, in
the slums of
planta In each case the author reconstructs the tion. section for us as he has seen it. His setting
New York, in the West of New England village or on a Southern
becomes
vital
part
it
of
his
story:
its
through
demand
for consistency
shapes to
own measure
his situations, his characters, his his pathos and his humor.
moral problems,
It is the purpose of this book to investigate the
numerous localities have had on the development of our short story. I pur pose to do this by taking up typical sections and showing how they have been treated by various short-story writers, what aspects of the localities they have presented, what features they have em phasized and, in general, what influence the lo
have exerted upon their short-story work. In the nature of the case my treatment can not be exhaustive. There are so many sections and so many writers for each that it would be an im possible task to take up the work of each author Even if done, it would be confusing. intensively. I have limited myself to the following sections as being fairly representative of our American life
calities
:
influence which our
New England;
ber
section
;
the Mississippi valley; the
lum
;
Michigan; Louisiana; Virginia; Georgia Tennessee Kentucky the far West New York City, with its numerous races and classes;
; ;
of
and Alaska.
calities the
From
the fictional use of these lo
reader can get some notion of the pos-
INTRODUCTION
sibilities
xiii
in territory not included.
The task
of
being comprehensive is all the more difficult be cause within the last ten years almost every avail able claim to an interesting locality or a sub
division of it has already been made.
From
the
San Francisco, the lumber camp of the North, the Jewish quarter of New York and the log cabins of field-workers in the South,
Chinese quarter of
themes for short stories have been evolved. Every point of the compass has a jealous and aggressive
group of literary folk standing guard over it and claiming it as their own. In the expression "American Short Story* in the title, I have included only work with a setting in the United States and by writers either native to the United States or long resident in it. Stories with settings in our Island possessions or in the
and South American have not been considered. Republics

various Central American
It is
hoped that the student of American
litera
ture will find in this investigation a not unworthy contribution to the bibliography of criticism deal
ing with an art-form almost distinctively American. For the student and the writer of the short story
it
should prove a valuable resume and should hint
at the lines along which their own localities may be treated. Even the general reader ought to find
the critical treatment of master short-story writers, an incentive toward a judicial selection of reading
matter.
xiv
INTRODUCTION
I have tried as far as possible to avoid critical citations concerning short-story writers from other sources. In almost all cases, I have quoted from
and have thus given the any conclusions I might have reached concerning the writer under discussion. These se lections have been culled with great care and are,
the writers themselves
basis for
I trust, fairly representative of the point of view of the literary men and women whom I have treated. For Chapters I and II no special originality is
matter.
er s
claimed except in the disposition of the subject They are introduced to refresh the read
mind concerning the entire subject and to give a philosophical basis for a study of locality in its
influence
upon the American short

it fills
With a
story. realizing sense of its shortcomings
and
yet with a feeling that
little
niche
all its
own in impressionistic literary criticism of the short story, this work is presented to the reader.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAP.
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
I
PAGE v
xi
FORCES IN DETERMINING LOCALITIES AND TYPES OF MEN AND WOMEN

Isolation
f
Climate
Topography
Industries
Occupations.
II
THE POINT OF CONTACT BETWEEN THE SHORT

STORY AND LOCALITY The question of setting
14
Locality as an aid
to unity of impression The effect of locality on action and characterization in the short
story.
III
IN OLD
S Hawthorne
Stowe.
NEW ENGLAND
William Austin
Harriet Beecher
24
IV
IN MODERN
NEW ENGLAND
studies
of
36
to-day,
V
VI
from Mrs. Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Brown. STORIES OF WHEAT AND LUMBER Hamlin Garland and the Mississippi Valley Stewart Edward White and Michigan.
New England
51
THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE

The old South
Harris.
in studies
64
from Cable, Page,

84
VII
VIII
IN KENTUCKY AND TENNESSEE Studies from James Lane Allen and Charles Egbert Craddock. IN THE WEST The call for the western short story The work of Bret Harte Eepresentative writers
97
XV
xvi
CHAPTER
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
of California
White
The work of Stewart Edward The work of 0. Henry.

113
IX
THE PHOTOGRAPHER OF NEW YORK IFE: O. HENRY An inductive study The comprehensive view
point.
X NEW
128 YORK FROM MANY ANGLES The Metropolis in various phases Myra Kelly and the school world Bruno Lessing and the Jew Over-specialization in locality Richard Harding Davis and the Club-man Other view
points.
.x
^! A
GLIMPSE AT THE FROZEN NORTH The fictional motifs of the North from the work of Jack London.
.
.150
Studies
XII
158 CONCLUSION: LOCALITY AS A FACTOR The contribution of locality to the develop ment of the American short story The influ ence of American life in making the short story the most typically American form of
.
our
fiction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
169
169
.
A
B
INDEX
Critical, Historical, Biographical
Fiction (arranged according to locality)
.171
.
177
THE AMERICAN SHORT

STORY
CHAPTER
I
FORCES IN DETERMINING LOCALITIES AND TYPES OF
MEN AND WOMEN

ALL fiction has its basis in reality. It is the product of the constructive imagination putting to
gether old material into new combinations. Even in such flights of fancy as the pseudo-scientific
romances of Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne and H. The note G-. Wells there is a substratum of fact. of reality must be struck even in fiction to dis tinguish the product of the fiction worker from
It fol the unrelated maunderings of the insane. that the laws of human character lows, therefore,
and
their processes of action, reaction and inter action obtain in fiction as they do in the living
us.
world about
Men and women,
the
raw material
of nearly all
stories, are subject, through the agency of their environment, to decided modifications in their points
of yiew, customs
and habits of thinking and

1
acting.
"

we
are the products
It is psychologically true that
of heredity
and environment.
Thousands of in
fluences, like so
many
and
recross, each
currents in a great bay, cross one modifying, though sometimes

a"
man. Out of the imperceptibly, the character of raw material of his nativity there is shaped for good or for evil the complex character of the modern
human
all
His joys, his sorrows, his struggles, being. On the vast stage of the leave their impress.
life
world amidst the unceasing dins of the
drama,
is
the individual actor shows all his heroic strength
and
all
his
pitiful
weakness.
Sometimes he
a god battling against great odds; sometimes mere
driftwood
lives
borne
toils,
and
his
downstream. But ever, as he nature and his fellow man set and
into
reset
characteristics
kaleidoscopic
com
binations.
^Let us examine some
of the most important forces
that determine localities and therefore types of
men
and women. When a community finds itself iso lated from others there is a tendency to continue the same habits and customs generation after gen In the Legend of Sleepy Hollow Wash eration.
(
ington Irving, picturing the seclusion of the place
and
its effect
on the inhabitants, relates how old
customs were perpetuated and innovations f rowTied upon. Everyone conformed to previous traditions so that time went on without making changes un
til
there was one hundred years difference be tween Sleepy Hollow and other communities.
LOCALITIES AND TYPES

Marken
what
in Holland
is
an interesting example The European tourist, after having "done" the famous art galleries at Amsterdam is induced to go to Marken. There,
of
isolation can do.
he
is told,
of centuries back.
he will see the fisher-folk in the dress In the streets of Amsterdam the
-
wooden shoon, the stomachers and quaint head

gear of the familiar pictures have given way to more modern garb. On this island, however, the
Of as they were centuries ago. for these islanders, as things course, profitable are now, to maintain a style of dress which at But originally tracts the tourist and his money.
tourist finds
it is
them
the cause was not commercial.
Remote from the mainland and left to their own devices, customs and traditions became ingrained. From genera tion to generation habits of living were trans mitted without change, the decorum to be observed at all village ceremonies became prescribed and a permanent fashion in dress was established.
find a parallel to these conditions, al in a milder degree, in our own country. though The New England village in winter is an isolated
We may
community.
Not infrequently the farmhouses themselves are distances apart. Day after day the farmer sees the snow-covered fields and hillocks,
does the same round of
"chores"
and contracts
"party"
his
social
life
to
in the same way, an occasional
or
"church-fair."
He
becomes awkward
in his
ways when out
of the beaten path of his
4
life,

uncongenial to strangers and taciturn of man In a vista so narrow and limited, prejudices
antipathies thrive.
trifles
ner.
and
Neighbors become bitter last long because there is plenty of time on the part of both to brood over each fancied slight and grievance. Gossip is retailed with zest, because anything is welcomed that breaks up the deadly, almost soulenemies over
and the feuds
killing
monotony.
of
The
silent
tragedies of spin-
sterhood and
dreary domestic existence are over and over again. This may sound very played gloomy and pessimistic. I do not deny that there is a brighter side but it exists in spite of the isola
tion to which the farmer
jected.
and
his family are sub
vThe modifying
well
effects of climate
known
to
need much comment.

lazily
Sea Islands the native

coa nut tree
shiftless.
on man are too In the South under his co squats

to drop.
and waits for the nuts
He
is
congenitally Owing good labor is so difficult to secure, the mineral resources of South America remain undeveloped. Liberia,
to the fact that
the negro republic in West Africa, has a climate which is considered among the hottest in the world.
As a
result it has lapsed into a primitive barbar
its founders were American negroes. recent traveler reports that the warship given by the German government lies rotting in the
ism although
principal harbor
one s head
is still
and that conveying freight on a favorite means of transporta-

tion.
The country
is
in
an undeveloped condition
because the individual units, the citizens, are en tirely too lazy to take hold of the government
firmly.
This is entirely due to climate. In the extreme north, industry suffers on account
of the intense cold.
The Esquimo
leaves his
oil-
heated snow hut only when he must, to obtain food. In the temperate climates, where the rigors of heat
and cold are not extreme, we find civilization at its highest efficiency and the greatest initiative among
men. Buckle in his
"
"History
of Civilization in
Eng
land"
Climate influences labor not only says: the laborer or invigorating him, but by enervating also by the effect it produces upon the regularity l He claims that people of northern of his habits.
"
climates as well as those of the south lack the habits of steady industry so characteristic of peo
ple in temperate climates. the people of Sweden and
In illustration he cites Norway on the one hand those of Portugal and Spain on the other. ami /In lands where there is constant contact with
the terrible
aspects of nature, great gales and the imagination of the inhabitants is earthquakes, heightened. Frequently it takes the form of su
The innumerable legends about tu perstitions. telary saints in Italy, Spain and Portugal illustrate
this tendency.
i Buckle Chap. II.
:
Heightened imagination, however,

of Civilization in
England,"
"History
Vol.
I,

takes
here
art.
another
turn
in
the
direction
of
The countries mentioned can boast of many great names in painting and sculpture, among them some of the very greatest Raffaello, Angelo, Murillo and Velasquez.
:
As
illustrating differences
among
natural causes
of the
soil,
among them,
peoples due to climate and fertility
Buckle cites a parallel between India In the former, man being constantly eclipsed by nature permitted his imagination to roam wildly. He created as gods monsters of un speakable terror (Siva). In Greece, on the other hand, where nature proved less formidable, man
and Greece.
conceived gods in his
own image
The topography
to
of a country
(Apollo, Jupiter). adds its influence
the
that of climate in determining the nature of inhabitants. People dwelling in mountain
regions are almost always liberty loving and in dependent. The verdure-clad mountains rising to
the skies inspire freedom.
battle with nature
self-reliant.
The constant, successful makes the people hardy and

flat
Barren,
stretches
such
in
as
the\
deserts of Arizona
and Sahara are generally un-/

frequently
inhabited
although
used
fills
transit.)
Death
of the
their
stalks over the sands
and
with terror
as a part
the souls of those
day
work.
who must face him The stories of the
desert
and
own
experiences tend to excite superstition
and
fatalism.
Sterility of soil in countries affects the
popu-

lation noticeably.
is
Where
the means of livelihood
so
hard
scattered.
tions
to obtain, the settlements are thin and In consequence educational institu
and the refining influences of
society
as
are neg agents in the development of character Men grow up like cactus plants ligible quantities.
with a
This is true of un of culture. or newly developing communities, as developed well as those that have become dwarfed, stunted or static on account of the sterility of the soil. But
minimum
the reverse
is
also true.
is
fluences are congenial to agriculture, thriving
and climatic in com munities spring up. Our great Middle West owes its wealth to the vast areas devoted to grain grow The vicinity of large towns renders civiliz ing. and refining influences easy of access. In our ing own country, where a great foreign element is
Where
the soil
well drained
engaged in the cultivation of the soil, the type of the older generation differs from that of the
younger. The gap between the old and the young widens. Problems of adjustment spring up and many tense situations are created. The student
nature, the writer, seizes upor^Jfeese Hamfor the creation of dramatic stories. aspects lin Garland in his excellent little collection, "Main
of
human
Travelled Roads" has made a study of this type. In the days when the Mississippi boats plied up and down the river the li^ on the decks became
markedly
characteristic.
Mark Twain,
in his en-

"Life
tertaining v/alume,
this phased
on the
Mississippi"
treats
The kinds of industries adopted by people vary with their proximity to bodies of water. Important cities like Chicago, New Orleans and New York
their prosperity to the fact of favorable geo graphic location. They themselves radiate their influence over vast areas in their vicinity.
owe
They
literary centers, broadly speaking, culture centers. In some cases, as, for instance, in the case of New York, a city assumes
become
art
centers,
position over the entire country. the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Great Lakes to the Mexican border its financial opera
commanding
From
tions
and
its
art products send
wave on wave of
lives.
jWhere the congested into a comparatively nar row area, social problems arise. The difference be tween the rich and the poor is greatly intensi
population
is
influence into countless
human
fied, because, on the one hand, the opportunities for spending wealth in a city are very numerous and the possibilities of degradation almost un
In the social and moral scale there al seems to be a one step lower. Thus count ways less types are created, running a human gauntlet from the luxury- wearied and pleasure-bored aris
limited.
tocrat to the flotsam
and jetsam of the
city streets,
the
human wrecks
that form on the bread line after

effects of isolation,
midnight.
iWe have dwelt so far on the

climate
We
and topography on the human character > have seen how man is reshaped in his manner
It of living through agencies beyond his control. remains to be seen how the interplay of man and
man and
industries
the influence of
man-made
institutions,
and occupations
affect the individual
and
humanity. In the early days of 49 when canvas-covered wagons followed a long trail westward to the gold mines of California, the far West had not yet found itself. Every incoming caravan brought a new host of adventurers. Law and order were
not firmly established. rough justice prevailed which often proved more cruel than it intended
to be.
collective units of
In the new
life all possible
tendencies for
good and for evil had free play. If a man desired to go to the devil he could go his own way pro vided he did not shoulder the wrong man once
too often.
The
lust
for gold
and the love of
woman, the pride of the pioneer, the rage of the whisky-maddened brute, the justice of the red wood gallows, all played their part in the new theater of dazzling opportunities, sudden wealth and baffled hopes. No wonder that the vogue of
wild-west fiction lasts so long. There are so many romantic and realistic combinations possible that
an author of even moderate fertility of invention never finds a dearth of picturesque material in that
quarter.
i
1
See
"The
Outcasts of Poker
Flat"
Bret Harte.
10

The cotton
fields of
life
a typical community
the South not only favored on the part of the negro
but an ingrained aristocratic exclusiveness on the part of their masters. The former, wallowing about in the cabins of the negro quarter, lived a
Sometimes plaintive their voices rose to the tunes of the banjo, sad, sometimes in a crescendo of hilarity they screamed encouragement to their buck and wing dancers.
life
of animal satisfaction.
and
The masters, accustomed to being served on every occasion, developed a formalism and courtesy found only in the courts of powerful rulers. "With their
equals always neighborly, social, convivial, they were patronizing or haughty with their inferiors,
as the
mood seized them. The factory towns of the past and present have done their share in modifying and creating types. Life is bounded on both sides by a factory whistle.
A monotony of routine prevails in which the human

being becomes a mechanism for the production of wealth, hardly a man with the full enjoyment of his powers. Passions are either subdued or break out inordinately. Tragedies are plentiful. Wives
and mothers deal with the drink problem in the concrete and all strive to drive the gaunt wolf of poverty a few inches further from the door. In agricultural areas and in tracts devoted to cow and sheep herding, the typical farmer and
the grazer are developed. They are simple folk whose joys are few and elementary, whose round

of life familiarizes
11
them with
certain set duties
which have to be performed.
When
not within
reaching distance of a large town or a city they be come men of ingrained characteristics, altogether
out of their element, unless they are at their work The short-story writer depicts or talking about it. them either on their native soil or facing for the
first
time the unfamiliar
life
of the city.
Some
most picturesque characters in fiction are 0. Henry and the cow-punchers of the ranches. Edward Stewart White are only two writers who have seen the possibilities in this field. The world of business, with its vast machinery
of our
of finance
types.
is
Nowhere are
responsible for so many
certain
distinctive
human
devices
em
tele
ployed as for the facilitation of trade.

toiling.
The
phone and the telegraph keep up an interminable

Office buildings rise to dizzy heights and are partitioned off into little coops, in each one of which sits a man or men whose sole object is to
manipulate what money they have to make more. Every click of the telegraph, every ring of the telephone, every quotation on the tape of the ticker during business hours makes some modification in someone s fortunes. Employed in undertakings varying from world-wide enterprises to little local deals is a tremendous office force of managers, as
sistants,
taries,
clerks,
typewriters, stenographers, secre

office
is
bookkeepers and of the financial world
The excitement boys. reflected in their move-
12
ments.

The earth revolves about the sun and they
revolve in individual orbits about their respective

businesses.
sys records inalterably the effect of all stimuli exerted upon it we can
When we remember
is
that the
human nervous
tem
very plastic and that
it
get some notion of the numerous character com binations possible in fiction. certain situation will be met in a hundred different ways, depending
of the
on the point of view of the principal actor and community in which he lives. The world-
old passions of love, hate, jealousy, anger, ambi tion, loyalty, justice, self-sacrifice, depend for their
full
th
play on the nature of outer stimuli and on nature of the reacting human being.
isolation, climate,
\^M All of the forces outlined here,
typography, industries and occupations change the tyabits or the nature of man by creating distincfive types.
fictional
Every
distinctive type
means a new
although the emotions themselves are old, a new variant is ever pos sible. Just as there are no two human beings
possibility,
for
whose features are exactly alike, so there are no two persons who will meet an emotional crisis in exactly the same way. Locate situations in def inite environments with fixed ways of looking at things and fixed modes of living and you will have a study of a concrete human being. The differ
entia will be his
own temperament.
he
environment,
however,
Without the would be a shadow.

Without
it
13
an author could never convey an im
no detail too trifling pression of reality. There is and no detail too vast for the faithful recording
of a
human
life.
Just as the best theater managers
look to the numerous minutiae of stage setting to make the drama realistic, so the writer of fic
tion to
make
ters not as ghosts
but as
men
must see his charac about in a dream haze moving of flesh and blood pursuing their call
his tale plausible
"The
ings in definite communities. Canby truly says in his book,

in
English,"
"And
Short Story
as the peculiarly geographical

civilization
development of our
and the general
shifting of social standards and social orders which marks the end of the nineteenth century, pro for its ceeded, more and more fields were opened up use. ^So after all Harte was (the short story s)
here right; it was the treatment of life, as it was the vogue of the short in America, which began
1
story."
i
Canby:
"The
Short Story in
English,"
p. 297.
CHAPTER
II
THE POINT OF CONTACT BETWEEN THE SHORT STORY AND THE LOCALITY
Now
that
determine
localities
we have considered the forces that and types of men and women
we are prepared to go a step further. What is the point of contact between the locality and the short story as an art form? Is the localization of a
story
an
is
"
essential
or
non-essential
process?
gained by giving the characters of our fiction a local habitation and a name"?
What
^The short-story writer if he artist desires isyan to create a definite impressionX Since the work
of tion of
Edgar Allan Poe, beginning with the publica "Berenice" in 1835 this has been an ac
In his re
"Hawthorne s
Tales"
cepted canon of short-story writing.
view of
"A
Poe says in part:
skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to ac commodate his incidents; but having conceived
with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such in cidents he then combines such events as may best
aid
i
him
in establishing his preconceived effect.

s
Graham
Magazine, May, 1835.
14
THE SHORT STORY AND LOCALITY

In one of the
the Short
latest an^rbest treatises
1
15
on
"Writing
Berg Esenwein, A.M., Story," by the editor of Lippincott s Monthly Maga Lit.D., zine, a man well acquainted with modern prac stated: tice, the following law is categorically
J.
short story produces a singleness of effect denied to the novel.
To produce
this effect,
however,
is
no easy matter.
It requires a peculiar
story real within a limited compass. Unlike the novelist the shortstory writer cannot build a character laboriously
that will tend to
power make the
to focus all elements
by showing
to the reader bit
by
bit the
many con
The introduction of the short story must be brief to the characters and vivid. No surplus detail can be added be
cerns of his most intimate
life.
yond those barely necessary

desired
lifelike.
effect.
to bring
about the
The
yet the impression must be moment we realize that the short
And
story
one dealing with puppets and marion ettes pulled by a visible string we leave the sorry
is
To identify the persons of exhibition in disgust. the fictitious drama with the men and women of
the
workaday world the writer
is
forced to show
their actions in relation to those of other prob
able persons.
setting.
Hence the short story must have a

a
Locality furnishes
i
great
number
of pictur-
J.
Berg Esenwein,
"Writing
the Short
Story"
Hinds
&
Noble, 1909.
16
esque settings. Writers do not hesitate at the pres ent day to make a first hand study of the localities
they intend to employ in works of fiction. Kirk Munro, a writer of Juveniles, and Jack London, the novelist, are only two of a great body that travel widely to do this. Nowadays no reputable
writer, for instance, would think of writing a short story that deals with the West unless he knows his
ground. Fred Lockley, the manager of the Pacific Monthly in an article for The Editor on Why They Come Back" quotes from an unsuc cessful short story and adds his comment
:
describing the cowboy the writer says: He was clothed in thick ominous buckskin, and at his either side hung pistols, their shining barrels pro truding out of their cases. The cowboy looked at
"In
the teacher with sheer astoundment

"Well
and remarked
blowed!"
as he fingered one of his shin
ing .42 s/ In the first place, I don t know how buckskin would go about it to look ominous; in the next place, they don t have thin, shining bar rels. They are blue steel and heavy barreled. Also they don t stick out of their cases for two
reasons, the first reason being that the case is called the holster, and the next reason being that the
holster is
made long enough
to
fit
the barrel, for

if it
the barrel would be sure to catch
protruded
out of the holster. Also, a cowboy usually uses a .44 caliber gun, or gat as they are usually termed. How he could finger a *. 42 is a mystery,
17
because no one ever heard of a .42 caliber revolver, for the simple reason they are not manufactured
in that
size.
1
It is evident that neither the reader nor his guardian, the editor, can belled to mistake a paste jewel for a real diamond. Klf the short-story writer
desires to have a picturesque setting he must know Then his story will have his locality thoroughly.
the convincing touch, the atmosphere of reality. As backgrounds, American writers have used
numerous
localities.
Among those
that can be cited
for the deep interest they lend to their stories are : South in Ante-Bellum Days/ "The New "The
Itagland
Homestead,"
"The
Mining Town of
49."
^Writers
Page, Wilkins and Bret Harte have used the setting as part of the story. The skillfully action is not only properly set off but it is directly
like
influenced through the conditions hypothesized by This will be shown in greater the environment.
detail later. story, as has been shown, demands It has been shown that the lo of effect. unity to secure this by making the setting cality helps
The short
and real. It has also been indicated how a false touch or ignorance can succeed in destroy
vivid
ing the necessary illusion.
At first glance it might seem that the work of Edgar Allan Poe himself is a contradiction to what
has been set forth.
i
Poe,
it
may
p. 197.
be argued,
is
The Editor, November, 1910,
18

Locality, therefore,
is
Southern writer, but the creations of his fancy be

long nowhere.
not the
all-
important influence in shaping a successful short stoy. ^But such reasoning overlooks the fact that in his works there is a substitute for locality. It is
atmosphere.
l//
The
setting
of Poe
stories
is
in
no place on
but in a spot consistently built up by his wonderful imagination. One need only begin "The Fall of. the House of Usher" to realize that the landscape is veiled in a haze of the author s own making. Somber, melancholy, soulthis earth
depressing,
story.
it
harmonizes with the mood of the
Crime and sin festering in a human con science are set off by the dreary marshland, the rotting timbers of the mansion and the dull leaden
sky.
fornia, flood it with sunshine

all its effect,
Locate the story in a happy valley of Cali and you rob it of
that broods over

to invent a
you exorcise the atmosphere of evil it and lends it unique distinction. In the "Masque of the Red Death" Poe is forced
wonderful palace with a suite of re markable rooms, each one decorated in a bizarre chromatic scheme. How much the story gains in
power through the vivid picturing of the scene those who have read it can testify. Personally I confess to a thrill whenever I read about the final stand of the prince against the Red Death in the Seventh Chamber, with its tripod of light
19
in the corridor streaming through a red window on the black draperies within. of
Poe, therefore, although he did not make use any definite locality, was forced to employ "at
s
mosphere."
cause Poe
It is a poor substitute, however, be most earnest partisans will not claim
for him that he succeeded in investing his stories with the impression of reality. The most that can be said of them from the standpoint of locality is that they obey the laws of their own imaginary domain. Within those limitations they are con
sistent.
Other demands of short story craftsmanship ne thorough knowledge of the locality in which the story is placed because the short story depends, for verisimilitude, mainly on action and
cessitate a
characterization.
diversifies both. It Locality a peculiar source of motivation. For ex supplies
ample, a girl may wish to remain single in her New England home because her many years of
spinsterhood have decided her habits irrevocably. She deliberately breaks an engagement for that
reason.
is
She finds that such an act of
sacrifice
easy for her. Her New England conscience and the attitude of her fellow villagers toward similar problems render this action probable and realistic.
Mary E. Wilkins has given us a very good story about this theme in A New England Nun. 1 Bret
*
Wilkins
"A
New England Nun and
Other
Stories."

Harte s story, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" 1 would have been improbable anywhere except in
A newly settled com its own peculiar setting. munity expels all the bad people of the town during a sudden wave of reform. These charac ters are all of a type to be found in the days
when
municipalities of the far West were The petty thief, the gambler just springing up. and the woman of the demi-monde are all very
the
little
characteristic.
A snowstorm arises one typical and the story goes on to its pathetic conclusion. Here the environment, the setting, is decidedly part of the web of the story itself. One cannot be detached from the other without render ing it all flat and insipid. In one of 0. Henry s stories 2 a young man is introduced who makes his living by swindling the people with whom he comes in contact. The scene is laid in the neighborhood of Union Square; the story opens with a view of the park benches and
of the climate
their lolling occupants, takes us to a "flashy" hotel on Broadway and amid the noise of the street
cars unravels itself before us.

fisher for
human dupes
In the roar of traffic Here again the noticed.

motive,
affects
Surely the keen a typical New Yorker. his operations are hardly
is
locality
furnishes
is
the
the character
and
"The
the
of
key to
Roaring
0.
Poker Flat" from Bret Harte. 2 "The Assessor of Success" from Henry.
1 "Outcasts of
Camp"
Luck
Four
"The
Million"

the solution of the situation.
21
In
all
the three in
stances cited, locality has been both the stimulus thjg? scene of plot development.
and
V^The
the
point of contact between the short story and First, the locality, therefore, is threefold:
locality furnishes a picturesque setting
and aids
realism
the locality makes possible unity ; secondly, of effect and thirdly it diversifies action and charac
by depicting men and theirâctions as by a peculiar environment. The influence of locality in creating the modern short story has been variously recognized by writers and critics. A few citations from different sources will perhaps serve to illustrate some other points
terization
affected
of view.
Clark, speaking of the widespread use color says: of local "Now this cult of the god of local color has
Mr.
Ward
its
comic aspects but it is really a sign of health, and the source of one main merit in all our recent It may have led to some wild scrambles fiction.
for the unoccupied sites but on the other hand it has taught many a young author to look for his
material at home, and has signalled to him the truth that honest, accurate observation will dis
cover the stuff of fiction anywhere. The true cos mopolite, one remembers, is the man who knows
own parish. There is as much of the universal human nature in an Indiana town as in Thacker ay s London or Balzac s Paris. And, other things
his

being equal, the Indiana town has or at least once had the advantage for us all of being com paratively fresh and novel. Local color for its own sake has no place in a story; but the history
of. the human creature in a new environment that will always afford a vision of 1 possibilities." Prof. Canby, in his book, "The Short in Story English," attributes the use of local color in the short story to the development of the new tech
nique.
"To
He
say
says:
when such
narratives begin
is
to court
disaster.
Not
so uncertain is the time
when they
became most popular with English and American

readers, to wit, the latter part of the nineteenth
century.
is not hard to understand why local color has played such a part in the short story of this The technique invented by Poe is thor period.
"It
oughly adapted to catch and record the superficies

life, and particularly idiosyncrasies of habit, and distinctive qualities of scene. Furthermore, since
of
is essential for good description, the much in little of the nineteenth century short story pro vides the easiest of means for getting observation
brevity
into readable form.
Again the rising popularity of the short story has been paralleled quite exactly by the growth of interest in special and
peoples
2
places."
1 From The Bookman, July, Edward White by Ward Clark,
1910.
p. 487.
Article on
p. 319.
Stewart
Canby:
"The
Short Story in
English."

Finally
23
L. Courtney in his volume of criti Feminine Note in Fiction," summar cism, "The izes the need of locality to the modern short story in these words "There must always be something pictorial in the short story. Its art is bound to be some vari ety of impressionism. Think of the conditions. Within thirty, forty or fifty pages you have to convey to the reader a perfectly distinct and self:
W.
centered narrative, idea or
impression."
Fiction,"
iW.
200.
L. Courtney:
"The
Feminine Note in
p.
CHAPTER
IN OLD
III
NEW ENGLAND
America.
a long time New England practically meant It is not surprising, therefore, that it exercised so profound an influence upon an art
FOR
form that developed much faster here than in the mother country, the short story. VThe first notable
interpreter of
New England in fiction was Nathaniel
Hawthorne.
v The faults in Hawthorne s stories, as looked at from the modern standpoint, are obvious. A great deal of irrelevant matter is introduced in the form of description and moralizing. The movement is therefore too frequently retarded. But in spite of
Poe
tial
these patent defects, his stories possess, along with s, the unity of impressionism which is so essen
a characteristic of the good short story of to
day.
In some respects the influence of New England on Hawthorne was greater than that on any one of his contemporaries. The passing of the sterner Puritanism had left its deep trace upon him. The same problems of conscience that stirred his an cestors to a more pronounced dogmatism found in 24
IN OLD
NEW ENGLAND
25
him an artistic expression. It must be remembered that Hawthorne spent fifty years of his life in one Aside from the time spent in Europe locality. when he acted as consul, it will be remembered that he lived in the neighborhood of Salem, Con cord and Boston all his life. In their "History of Literature in America," Professors Wendell and Greenough make this statement
:
he grew to be of all our writers the least The circum imitative, the most surely individual.
"Thus
stances of his life combined with the sensitiveness

of his nature to
make
else
his individuality indigenous.
he expresses the deepest temper Beyond anyone of that New England race which brought him forth, and which now, at least in the phases we have
1 known, seems vanishing from the earth. Hawthorne was a delicate receptive agent of the
its over spiritual inheritance of New England, conscience. Some writers notice wrought religious
the features of landscape about them, others the peculiarities, the characteristic traits, the attitude
toward
life of the people in their localities. ^Bawthorne seized the very essence of their natures and
through wrought To him the locality in which he lived connoted more

it
his artistry into short stories.
than its "visible forms." This aspect of Hawthorne

actual
1
"History
work
as well as his
observation for literary purposes of the

of Literature in P. 350. Pub. 1904.
America"
Wendell
and
Greenough.
26

which he lived require some
locality in
tion.
illustra
"The Gentle Boy" shows Hawthorne s attitude toward Puritan New England. It is a powerful study of Puritan persecution against the Quakers.
Highly imaginative though

spirit of the times.
it is, it is
true to the
The characters are New Englanders of a bygone generation when a stern and active fanaticism had not yet been replaced by
moral rigidity only.
Here is a picture of Puritan intolerance from The Gentle Boy." Pearson, his wife and the
Quaker
door:
1
lad, Ilbrahim, are entering at the
church
Pearson and Dorothy separated at the door of
the meeting house, and Ilbrahim, being within the years of infancy, was retained under the care of
the latter.
The wrinkled beldams involved them

even
selves in their rusty cloaks as he passed by;
the mild-featured maidens seemed to dread con
tamination; and
many
a stern old
man
arose
and
turned his repulsive and unheavenly countenance upon the gentle boy, as if the sanctuary were pol luted by his presence. He was a sweet infant of
the skies that
had strayed away from
his
home,
and
all
the inhabitants of this miserable world
up their impure hearts against him, drew back their earth-soiled garments from his touch, and x said, We are holier than thou.
closed
"
i "Twice
Told
Tales"
A. L. Burt.
P. 63.
IN OLD
The
desire
NEW ENGLAND
martyrdom implanted
in
27
the
is
for
breasts of those exposed to bitter persecution
thus depicted
"Catherine s
the sundering of all
fanaticism had become wilder by human ties; and wherever a
scourge was lifted, there was she to receive the blow, and whenever a dungeon was unbarred,
thither she
came
to cast herself
upon the
floor."
In the "Gentle Boy" the conflict is between the harsh Puritan nature and the sweeter, although
equally firm, Quaker spirit. Hawthorne s grasp of the feelings manifested by both parties in the un
equal combat
"The
is
masterly.
a study of the Puri tan asserting his rights against the tyrannical gov
Gray
Champion" is
ernment of Andros, the representative of James

II.
There is no want of evidence that Hawthorne was a good observer, although his descriptions are The fol ever colored or modified by his fancy. stories and sketches are almost purely de lowing
scriptive, landscape studies
through a lens
s
Ramble,"
artisti
"Rill
cally focused:
"Little
Annie
from the Town

"The
Pump," "Sights
from a
Steeple,"
Village
Uncle,"
and
"The
Toll-Gatherer
Day. index of their contents.
The
titles
themselves are almost a sufficient
characteristic bit of description from one of them might not be out of place. It illustrates ad
mirably Hawthorne
peculiar mastery of subjective
28

It is taken from "Little Annie and pictures a candy shop:
s
description.
Ramble"
"Here
is
a shop to which the recollections of
my
boyhood as well as present partialities give a pe How delightful to let the fancy culiar magic. revel on the dainties of a confectioner those pies
with such white and flaky paste, their contents be ing a mystery, whether rich mince with whole
plums intermixed, or piquant apple delicately roseflavored those cakes, heart shaped or round, piled in a lofty pyramid those sweet little circlets sweetly
;
;
named
those dark, majestic masses fit to be bridal loaves at the wedding of an heiress, moun
kisses
;
tains in size, their
summits deeply snow covered
with sugar.
Oh,
my mouth
waters,
little
An
so doth yours, but we will not be tempted nie, to an imaginary feast; so let us hasten on except
and
ward devouring the vision of a plum cake." 1 Numerous descriptive passages, written in many moods can be adduced to illustrate the impression which his environment made upon him, spiritually and from the standpoint of subjective observation. It is true that Hawthorne s sense of locality is dimly suggested but this is to be expected from an
author whose characteristic atmosphere is one of half lights and shadows. Perhaps his characters are never real flesh and blood, nor are his scenes
highly subjective as they are, other than pictures from the Geography of Dreams. But there is no
i "Twice
Told
Tales"
Burt
&
Co.
P. 103.
IN OLD
NEW ENGLAND
29
doubt whatsoever that the heart of his locality in them. ^There is no doubt that in many of his short stories and novels he chose models for his.
is
from among his own countrymen and. was deeply influenced by the history and fortunes In the stories and sketches al of New England. as well as in many others, he drew : ready named, from his own experiences and observations. He, watched the pageant passing before him with theeye of a dreamer but noted details with the skillful
characters
his
accuracy of a journalist. Desirous of investing work with reality, he kept careful note books. Fortunately the public has had a chance to study
these in the volumes
known
as
"
American Note
of description, musing Books," in which tiny bits and imagination are jotted down. It is clear thaj:
frequently from these bare hints, Hawthorne built/ the finished structure. He made the best of thN
in one section entailed
enforced provincialism which his long residency upon him. To Longfellow
he once wrote:
have another great difficulty in the lack of materials for I have seen so little of the world that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of. Sometimes, through a peep hole, I have caught a glimpse of the real world, and the two or three articles in which I have portrayed these glimpses please me better than the others."
"I
.
It is interesting to notice the topics
Hawthorne
his
"Note
thought worthy
of
jotting
down
in
30

They
are a sufficient index of what in environment impressed him most For purposes of reference I have classified his first ten
Books."
his physical
topics as to subject matter. 1. walk to the seashore

2.
A A
They are as follows and back.

"Weather
walk in North Salem.
noted
landscape
3.
children playing. ride to Boston a stop at an inn in East
Boston
4.
comment on
the characters found there.
A drive to Nahant
comment on physiognomy
;
a hint of a story. the appearance of the sea 5. drive to Ipswich a country tavern char acters sitting there a graveyard visit numerous
studies for future stories.

6. Comment on the appearance of oaks in an autumnal wood on a sermon heard hints for
stories.
7.
Principally hints for stories and sketches of
a highly fanciful nature.

8.
tion of the sky

9.
walk down to the shore in Salem descrip and sea. Comment on the appearance of elm trees in
miscellaneous reflections suggested by
September
his reading.
10.
A walk through Dark Lane and home through

1
the village of Danvers landscape described meet ing house in Danvers described miscellaneous
thoughts and studies for sketches and stories. It will be noted that the hints for stories are ini
Hawthorne
"The
American Note
Books."
IN OLD
NEW ENGLAND
We
31
may terspersed among his other observations. be allowed to draw the inference that Hawthorne
stories
took a great deal of the actual material for short and sketches from personal observation.
The inner significance of his outward world, of Of his art course, received the greatest attention. he says himself in what is generally considered one
of his best short stories, Rappaccini s Daughter (referring to Aubepine, the mythical author of the
story, a thinly disguised veil for
self)
:
i i
"His
fictions are
sometimes
Hawthorne him historical, some
times of the present day, and sometimes, as far as can be discovered, have little or no reference either
In any cas-e he generally con to time or space. tents himself with a very slight embroidery of out
ward manners, the faintest possible counterfeit of real life, and endeavors to create an interest
by some less obvious peculiarity of the subject/ We have seen then that Hawthorne reflects his environment in his own. way, that he understands"
inner life, that he has read aright the Puritan temperament. In the deepest and fullest sense, / We shall f therefore, he has reacted on his locality. see how the same New England has impressed other writers, but before going on to them it might not
its
<
be amiss to quote a paragraph from a modern critic, Mr. Robert Morss Lovett, concerning the signifi
cance of Hawthorne
idea that
1
short story.
He
confirms the \
his locality.
Hawthorne was influenced by

:
Hawthorne
"Rappaccini s Daughter."
32

"Hawthorne deals
centricities of conscience
with moral problems and ec which might be said, like
Poe
mechanical horrors, to have no necessary or
home and yet his tales are characteristic and unmistakably of New England. They ally embody in art that which, in the life of that corner of the world, has most fineness of flavor, and del icacy and distinction and charm. They are the
exclusive
chief contribution of the
fiction
new world
to the
world
absolutely native and national. In their localism too, they set the type which the American short story has in the main followed, in- the tales
of Miss Wilkins, of Mr. Garland, of Bret Harte, 1 to mention three writers among three hundred. There are two writers of the pre-modern era
7
(the era of imperfect technique) in
New
England,
require some mention.

tin
<who
They are William Aus
Neither onelsrpreeminently a great or e veil a -good short-story writer but their work requires some mention because it
and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
V William
shows the influence of the older New England. Austin is chiefly noted for his story "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man." The main char acter is partly real, partly mythical, but a great deal of interesting matter is to be found colicern-
first
ing the roads and the inns of the early days. The part was printed in Buckingham s New Eng land Galaxy, September 10, 1824 and it was sevi
Robert Morss Lovett:
"On
Hawthorne
Short
Story"
in Reader, August, 1905.
IN
OLD
NEW ENGLAND
e.
33
eral times reprinted entire,
g. 7
in the Boston
Book for 1841.
New York
in
those
days was
probably not the center of importance to the coun try that it is to-day. In the course of the story,
Rugg
"
says,
Poh,
there.
in our
New York is nothing; though I was never am told you might put all New York mill pond (Boston s). No, sir, New York,
I
I assure you,
:
is but a sorry affair; no more to be with Boston than a wigwam with a compared
palace.
jXfeich more important than this story in reflecting the older New England for us is the work of Har
riet
Her two volumes, "Oldtown Lawson s Oldtown Fireside Folks/ are pictures of a bygone society. The Stories! time is about 1800 and the types shown are those
Beecher Stowe.
and
"Sam
of a little Massachusetts village in Norfolk county.
They include Indians, Hibernians and English, drawn with sympathy and humor. ^Since Mrs. Stowe was born in 1812 it is not improbable that
her sketches are the result of personal observation, One character, Sam Lawson, a story teller, runs
through
all
the stories.
The following extract from "The Ghost in the matter was, es Mill," indicates how scarce reading
pecially of the lighter kind. "In those days we had no magazines and daily Once a papers, each reeling off a serial story.
week, The Columbian Sentinel came from Boston
34
with

its
slender stock of news and editorial; but pictorial, narrative and which keep the mind of the present poetical gen eration ablaze with excitement had not then even
all
the multiform devices
an existence.
There was no theater, no opera;
there were in Oldtown no parties or balls, except perhaps, the annual election or Thanksgiving festi val and when winter came and the sun went
;
down
dark
at half past four o clock

sity of
and
left the long,
hours of evening to be provided for, the neces
amusement became
loneliness of early
:
urgent."
is thus depicted "In those days of early Massachusetts faith and credence was in the very air. Two thirds of New
The
New England
England was then dark and unbroken forests, through whose tangled paths the mysterious win
ter wind groaned and shrieked and howled with weird noises and unaccountable clamors. Along the iron-bound shore, the stormful Atlantic raved and thundered, and dashed its moaning waters as if to deaden and deafen any voice that might tell
of the settled life of the old civilized world,
and
shut us forever into the

"How
wilderness."
to
Fight the
Devil"
is
another one of Mrs.
same volume. It tells of a practical joke that went The tendency astray.
s
Stowe
stories
in the
superstitious belief among the simple New Eng land folk of the early nineteenth century forms the theme of the story. The following paragraph shows
to
IN OLD
how
these
beliefs
NEW ENGLAND
affected
35
the
nomenclature of
places in the neighborhood.
almost every New England village the per sonality of Satan has been acknowledged by calling
"In
Bowl/ The Devil s Kettle/ The Devil s Pulpit/ and The Devil s Den/ have been designations that marked places or objects of some striking natural
Often these are found in the midst of and romantic scenery, and the sinister name seems to have no effect in lessening its attractions." Unlike Hawthorne s, Mrs. Stowe s interest was mainly pictorial.
peculiarity.
by his name some particular rock or cave, or other natural object whose singularity would seem to suggest a more than mortal occupancy. The Devil s Punch Bowl/ The Devil s Wash
the most beautiful
We
shall
who have
pass on to a group of three writers treated of New England in the modern
now
We shall see how each one of these, Miss Wilkins, 1 Miss Jewett and Miss Brown, was impressed by her environment.
short story.
1
Now
Mrs. Charles Freeman.
CHAPTER IV
IN
MODERN NEW ENGLAND
FOR some
of
peculiar psychologic reason, the field
New England
three women.
by man, Sarah Orne Jewett and Alice Brown. Per haps it is because the life of New England with its barrenness of esthetic inspiration has been es Hav sex. pecially irksome to the more volatile them a deeper spiritual impression, ing made upon it may have found a more ready and more skill
ful literary expression.
lative
portraiture has been monopolized They are Mary Wilkins Free
But
this is
merely specu
and suggested by Hawthorne Mthe New England short story of to day represents a triumph of feminine achievement.
the fact that aside from
Since the era of the Puritan, the importance of the purely religious element in the life of New England has dwindled. The bitter fanaticism
which condemned men to the stake for differences in creed is gone. The whip, once used liberally on the backs of men, is now employed sparingly even on horses. But character undergoes a slower change than practice. We cannot assume that a
few generations have completely transformed the
36
IN
MODERN NEW ENGLAND
37
Puritan attitude. We musjLMJidlBF e that the tremendous strength of charâeter^wnich originally drove them to a new country, disappeared after the religious issues, upon which it had been freely Take, ks an example, a gen exercised, were gone.
eral
who has come back fronJthe wars. Although he moves about in a friendly and peaceable social
he is still the general. His bearing, his manner, the intonation of his speech are not sud denly dropped. So the strength of the Puritan, his keen religious conscience, once struggling so great problems of church and indomitably w to master the vexing but petty state, is calle
circle,
tangles
"The
.c
and industrial environment,

is
farmer
a descendant of the
to see
Puritan,
tudy him
how
the old
tempera
are
ini
To Mrs. Freeman we ged. thful portrayal of the type.

y the
:
She
will
dpc
and
c<
New England man-
nerisms
peculiarities of conscience, them as a blend of heredity
and the
study of of view.
odern
;o
life.
It is not
.uch to
make an exhaustive
it
find his habitual point re be more profitable to

characteristic stories of
^.present Miss Wilkins

eral survey.
*
"A
inten
npt a comprehensive gen

Nun" is
New Engmnd
the story of a typical
old maid,
prim and methodical, who had become so
38
life and its regular routine that the prospect of a change appalls her. She gladly relinquishes an opportunity to marry, be cause it would take her out of the orbit of habit.
used to her single
great skill Miss Wilkins pictures her queer neat ways and her horror of having anything The rough boots of a man would work disarranged. havoc with the carpet and the freshly scoured
little
With
floor.
The following is a deft bit of characterization "She had been peacefully sewing at her sitting, room window all the afternoon. Now she quilted
:
her needle carefully into her work, which she folded precisely, and laid in a basket with her thimble and thread and scissors. Louisa Ellis could not remem
ber that ever in her life she had mislaid one of these little feminine appurtenances, which had be
come, from long use and constant association, a very part of her personality. Louisa tied a green apron round her waist, and got out a flat straw hat with a green ribbon. Then
she went into the garden with a little blue crock ery bowl to pick some currants for her tea. After the currants were picked she sat on the back door
and stemmed them, collecting the stems care fully in her apron, and afterwards throwing them into the hencoop. She looked sharply at the grass
step
beside the step to see if any had fallen there. This is almost a perfect picture of spinsterhood,
contented and thoroughly inured to the
life
of petty
IN
duties
MODERN NEW ENGLAND

We
in
39
and observations.
the
see in such a picture
the universal
particular.
Mrs. Freeman
has succeeded not in drawing an old maid of her own locality but in sounding the very depth of a unconscious tragedy. Affection and spinster s
mother love have been turned into a passion for

neatness in trivialities.
Where young men
of the
marrying kind are few and maidens many, such a type is by no mean^rare. In another story, "A Gatherer of Simples," this
"life
to use Shaw s expression, takes another Instead of spending itself in a round of do mestic duties it turns to an absorbing avocation.
force,"
turn.
is a study with a rich capacity for love almost atrophied under the desiccating influence of a very narrow village environment. She loves her herbs
The principal character, Aurelia Flower,
of a
woman
before chance brings

the form of a
human
love into her life in
little girl,
Myrtie,
whom
she adopts.
In the struggle for the ultimate possession of the child all her pent-up affection bursts out. Lack
of wide interests
and cheerful
ing effect of a
life
society and the stunt of routine are well portrayed.
In picturing the delight with which Viny, one of the minor characters, an invalid, hears a bit of news, Mrs. Freeman writes:
"Viny
drank in the story as
if it
much nourishing jelly. Her too narrow killing her as much as anything
else."
had been so life was

is
That well-known type, the kitchen drudge,
40

title
the main character in the

"A
story of her volume,

girl is
Humble
Romance."
In the introductory paragraphs the

at her work.
toil
shown
The physical
:
results of her protracted
are vividly portrayed
finger joints and wrist bones were knotty and out of proportion, her elbows, which her rolledup sleeves displayed, were pointed and knobby, her
"Her
shoulders bent, her feet spread beyond their natural bounds from head to foot she was a little discor dant note. She had a pale, peaked face, her scanty, fair hair was strained tightly back and twisted into a tiny knot, and her expression was at once
passive
and
eager."
minuteness of detail and intense reality is it not comparable to the justly celebrated paintings of the Dutch masters? Poor Sally appears in all her gauntness, all her pitiful awkwardness. Not an
its
In
angle nor a straight line nor a hideous knot is soft ened by the glow of the "light that never was on land or sea." Dull, drab daylight and gray
reality
!
Her
life,
however,
still
is
sweetened by a touch of ro
tin peddler.
mance when she marries a

"Their
way
The
country.
It
tin peddler
lay through a thinly settled found readier customers
wives who were far from stores. was late spring. Often they rode for a mile or two through the lovely fresh woods without coming to a single house.
in those farmers
IN
MODERN NEW ENGLAND
41
"The girl had never heard of Arcadia, but all unexpressed to herself she was riding through it under gold-green boughs to the sweet broken jang
ling of
tinware."
The romance is certainly humble, the characters come from a low walk of life but the power of the writer and her sincere grasp of the truth are a
constant source of gripping interest.
The story depends for its main interest on the evolution of the soul of a kitchen drudge from the
numbness caused by the narrowness and hostility her farmhouse environment. The stooping figure at the kitchen sink might well be placed side by side with that other delineation of Toil Brutaliz ing Man The Man with the Hoe.
of
to be
One of her very best stories, considered by many among the best ever written, is "The Revolt of Mother." As its name indicates it is a study
It presents a faith
of strained domestic relations.
ful picture of New England life, narrating the re volt of a woman who had for forty years sub jugated her own will to that of her husband.
"Father"
and
"Mother"
as well as
"Sammy,"
the
son,
are reproduced with great fidelity to life. Adoniram, the father, is a man whose way of living
had tightened up
his
tongue and cramped his
soul.
content to leave his family in sordid quar ters while he continues putting up outhouses and
is
He
sheds for his cattle.
but very
little.
His
speaks seldom and then silence, however, is not the
He
42
silence of restraint but the silence of a spirit that
has been dulled and brutalized by the unvarying sequences of rigorous farm labors.
The opening of the story is impressive. The two main characters at once reveal their natures not only in what they do but in what they fail to do
:
"
Father!
"
"
What What
is it?
are
them men diggin over there in the
field for?
"
of the old
There was a sudden dropping and enlarging man s face as if some heavy weight
had settled therein; he shut his mouth tight and went on harnessing the great bay mare. He hustled the collar on to her neck with a jerk.
"
Father!
The old man slapped the saddle upon the mare

back.
"
Look
men
to
are diggin
here, father, I want to know over in the field for, an
what them
I
goin
know. I wish you d go into the house, mother, and tend to your own affairs, the old man said then. He ran his words together and his speech was al most as inarticulate as a growl."
This passage illustrates a type of mind dwelling
in a twilight or darkness of its own making. Som ber, curt and brutal, Adoniram reflects the dead ening of the spirit which results from the daily grind.
IN
MODERN NEW ENGLAND

it
43
the stories cited,
can be readily seen

its
mind reacted on
sympathy of touch she
group.
is
environ-
downright realism of portrayal and

unrivaled in her
life
own
are almost pain pictures^pf ful in their fidelity. In a great number of her stories the happiness and suffering of woman is her theme, but she is by no means less able to
Her
rural
The Puritan just seen. and repression of modern New England have been carefully noted by her and artistically limned. Altogether her work is a distinct contribution to the fiction of locality and to American literature.
rigidity, soul starvation,
,
delineate men, as
we have
like
had her inspiration from
Mrs. Freeman, has

re
New England and
corded her observation in story form with deep

insight, ller characters, in the main, are in a higher social order than Mrs. Free man s; her outlook on life is more even, more calm; there is less violence of tragedy and more of hap piness in her stories but, like her, Miss Jewett is an artist of a high order. Seldom does she stray from her Maine villages and New
sympathy and
England back
grounds.
Her works were
recently collected and
brought out in a uniform edition. Commenting upon her life-work the reviewer of The Times
said
x
:
"The
people of her books are familiar to us

"New
all.
iBook Review,
York
Times,"
Xov.
19, 1910.
44
Her stories are constructed from material of the most elemental kind: of the pathos incident to old
age and loneliness, of the joy of friendship, the
peace of quiet paths, of the struggle of trying to make both ends meet, of the humorous development
of character where isolation lays heart and mind, or perhaps the
its emphasis on odd cranks and
whimsies induced by the like
cause."
Winter Courtship will give story some idea of the characters she chooses for her tales
Her
and her attitude toward them. The stage driver, who is a widower
solitary passenger
has, as his
on a winter journey of seven miles, a woman who is a widow. Mrs. Tobin cleverly manipulates the situation to elicit a proposal from
Jefferson.
gentle
humor pervades
the sketch.
for eighteen years had been traveling the seven miles between Sanscrit Pond and North Kilby, is a vivid bit of characterization. He
The stage
driver,
who
is
depicted as a mild
stories
little
man who
reads blood
an unloaded heavy revolver under his front seat cushion. Both he

carries
and thunder
and
and the scheming old widow, Mrs. Tobin, are typical The sameness of their New England surroundings. in his life is well suggested and also her sense of triumph in getting the man she wanted against the
competition of two elderly rivals. The rigors of a New England winter, as seen
i
Sarah Orne Jewett

Wayfarers."
"A
Winter
Courtship"
from Stran
gers and
IN
MODERN NEW ENGLAND
45
by Miss Jewett, can be gathered from this para graph Be we got four more (miles) to make? Oh, Urge the beast, laws! mourned Mrs. Tobin. my
:
"
can t ye, Jeff son? I ain t used to bein out in such bleak weather. Seems if I couldn t get my with I m all pinched up and wigglin breath. Tain t no use lettin the hoss go shivers now.
:
step-a-ty-step, this fashion. contrast to this bit of realism
and
also to the
work
called
of Mrs.
"A
Freeman is White Heron/
a delicate little sketch

It is a country idyl
little town-bred girl is taken of early summer. to her grandmother s house in the country and learns to love the birds and little animals that are
the plentiful near her wild home. While driving cow home one evening, she meets with a young man
who
is
an ornithologist and has spent the day
hunting for birds. He especially seeks information about a white heron. Sylvia thinks she knows the spot where the nest is found, because once she
had seen the bird standing in the lush grass

the
of
swamp
near the woods.
At dawn
the next
morning she climbs the tallest pine tree in the woods and learns, to a certainty, where the nest is lo The stranger had promised her ten dollars cated.
if
she could help him find it. In spite of this inducement she decides to maintain silence rather than be the cause of the white heron s death.
The woods
at nightfall are thus described:
46
"The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o clock, though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees. little girl was driving home her cow, a plodding, dilatory, provoking creature in her behavior, but a valued companion for all that. They were going away from the western
into the dark woods, but were familiar with the path, and it was no matter whether their eyes could see it or not."
light,
and striking deep
their feet
The beauty and fragrance of the woods

a fitting setting for this of a wood-child.
little
affords
episode in the life
in its suggestion is a story Miss Temgy^sJWatchers. "Two women -called^ are acting as watchers at a funeral in a small farm ing town of New Hampshire. Their characteristic
?
,
Much- jnore_grim
and insight into the lovable character of the deceased furnishes the main interest.
gossip
The appearance of the two gested in this sentence:

"Their
women
is
well sug
faces
were
interesting
of
the
dry,
shrewd, quick-witted New England type, with thin hair twisted neatly back out of the way."
The sterile nature of most of the farm land is hinted at by Mrs. Crow, one of the women: Tempy had only ninety dollars a year that came in to her; rest of her livin she got by helpin about with what she raised off this little o
piece
ground, sand on one side and clay the other.
"
--IN
MODERN NEW ENGLAND
47
hroughout all her stories the reader finds evi dences not only of external observation but also of
deep understanding. The New England existence, narrow yet intense, finds in her a literary artist who comes to her task in a genial spirit, prepared to
see the brightest side. After one has been intro duced to the soul-embittered, never-to-be-forgotten characters of Mrs. Freeman one turns with relief to the more genial atmosphere of Miss Jewett.
ÎisÂJieBrown,
trio is
felt
the last of the
New England
decidedly worthy of mention. She too has the spirit of her home environment. Her
stories are characterized
by a joyous outdoor spirit and a keen delight in the open air. They are in the main similar in subject matter and treatment to those of Miss Wilkins and Miss Jewett.
One
cal 1 ed
fragrant
of her sketches, typical of her best work, with the rosemary of remembrance. It
is
is
i JDnnryflj flF
and views the
life
of a
little
New
Englancf village from the point of view in dicated by its name. In one house dwelt a little woman whose instinct for play found an outlet in In another lived a farmer solitary croquet games. whose passion for trading manifested itself out
wardly in a wild disorder of farming implements and vehicles in his dooryard. In front of a third
house stood a hogshead filled with rain water into whose mysterious depths a little child gazed with a deep poetic brooding. The little woman who
liked to play croquet
had a very
stolid
husband

was duller than the ox which ploughs day long for his handful of hay at night and his heavy slumber; but Delia, though she carried her end of the yoke with a gallant spirit, had dreams and desires forever bursting from brown shells,
"Eben
all
only to live a
moment
in the air
and then
like
bubbles, die." This insistence on types whose emotions are re pressed or distorted is characteristic of the New
England trio of writers we are considering. Cramped from its proper bounds and outlets by a bare and unsympathetic environment, the esthetic
emotion in woman, the play instinct, which is al most the art instinct, to the pursuit of turnp crotchets and eccentricities. * Hence the New Eng land short story is so full of queer characters, hu
man caricatures whose grotesque physical and mental features furnish rare material for the sym
pathetic artist.^
Her story, Experience of Hannah Prime," is a study of a revival meeting. A soul made bitter by continuous sorrow is regenerated. Hannah Prime
widow whose son had taken the down At the very height of her grief she and comfort in watching the dusk settle on woods and lake. The prayer meeting before which Hannah tells
is
a stricken
path. finds solace
ward
her soul story
is
thus pictured
in all the meeting had thus far mirrored others of its class. If the droning ex"Taking it all
IN
MODERN NEW ENGLAND
49
periences were devoid of all human passion, it was chiefly because they had to be expressed in the
phrase of strict theological usage. There was an unspoken agreement that feelings of this sort should be described in a certain way. They were not the affairs of the hearth and market; they were mat ters pertaining to that awful entity called the soul, and must be dressed in the fine linen which she herself had elected to wear." The description of the village schoolroom in which the meeting was held is interesting There were the maps of North and South Amer
:
ica,
still
the yellowed evergreens, relics of Last day, festooned the windows and an intricate sum,
there explained to the uncomprehending admira tion of the village fathers, still adorned the black
board."
Very
"A
similar in theme to Mrs.

Nun,"
Freeman
s story.
New England
is
Alice
is
Brown
s^ A
a study of prim _SecondÎarriage. ness in an old maid; the latter is a study of the effects of routine on a married woman. Her hus
The former
band had
just died
little
habituated to
tasks, duties
and her mind had become so and observances

late
which had become formulated about her

that she looks with reluctance
spouse
and
later with horror
on a second marriage. In spite of the fact that she is wooed again by a lover of her youth, she prefers to remain single for the rest of her life, alone with her memories. Miss Brown s collection,
"
50
THE AMEEICAN SHORT STORY
contains specimens of her best work and Tales, further illustrations of her point of view.
proved fertile Although in popularity, stories dealing with the Far West" have always appealed to a wider reading public because of their more obvious spectacular elements, there has always
to
New England
the
fiction
s sterile soil has thus
worker.
been a quiet following for the domestic story of England. In Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman. Sarah Orne Jewett and Alice Brown this genre of story has found its ablest exponents and New
New
England her most eloquent
interpreters.
CHAPTER V
STORIES OF
WHEAT AND LUMBER: THE

VALLEY AND MICHIGAN
I.
MISSISSIPPI
WE now go further west to see how our common human nature reacts on a different environment.
The
there.
original fund, the good and the bad is always Variations arise because Nature herself pre
many differing phases and because com munities of men, in some mysterious way, tend to create their own standards. Along comes the unit of life, the individual person, with his native
sents so
capacities,
meets his environment and
is
shaped
by
it.
Closely akin to Mrs. Freeman s stories of New life are those of^Hamlin Garland dealing .with the Mississippi valley. The^Jsgvjnote of both
England
us_suffering: GaflaSTdTlpresents realistic pictures of the hard-worked farmer. Overburdened and dull,
plodding day after day through the same round of arduous and unremunerative toil, he misses most
of the joys that life has to offer.
He
is
a type of
more than twenty years

farmer.
Our
ago, the pioneer Western deepest sympathies are stirred by the
51
52
narrative of his soul-stunting drudgery and his heroic though passive endurance. Y "Main Travelled Roads" contains six stories,
each one powerful. It will be sufficient for our purpose which is to indicate the author s point of view and the influence of the locality upon his
work
The
in
merely to subject three of these to careful

first
analysis.
story
is
"
Branch
Road,"
localized
Mississippi The tragedy has its inception in the jealous valley. rage a lover feels because his sweetheart smiles on
others.
the wheat-growing region
of the
There follows between the pair a seven-
year separation.
a
During that interval she marries
Kinney. He is a brute and she becomes a drudge, worn to the bone through the constant housework and the unceasing taunts of her husband and his parents, who live with them.
man named
They nag
at her continually
and make her
life al
most unendurable through the practice of many

insidious meannesses.
The big truth of the narrative lies in the fact that she is typical of a class of unhappy farmers wives in that locality. Dulled and insensible them
anything except the narrow profit and killing routine of life, the farmers those in intimate contact with them to ill expose treatment and neglect. The woman with her in cessant household duties is physically and mentally beaten down. Moral degeneration follows.
selves to
loss
and the
STORIES OF
The
WHEAT AND LUMBER

It
53
setting is delightfully portrayed.
shows
a keen appreciation of nature on the part of the seize her happy moods. writer, an ability also to feels like using that overworked phrase "the One
the exuberance of Nature.
and But the tragedy is only deepened by contrasting this bounty and happiness with the pitiful, passion-tossed and passion-broken
spirit of the
West"
to describe the sunshine
life of
man.
urges
It is singularly fitting that when her old lover the sickly drudge his best girl of yore to
run away with him and she
at last consents, that
the author should reflect the infinity of man s life and its countless phases in a parting touch from
Nature.
smiled again in spite of herself. Will shuddered with a thrill of fear, she was so weak and worn. But the sun shone on the dazzling, rust wheat, the fathomless sky, blue as a sea, bent
"She
ling
above them and the world lay before them." The author s keen observation of his environment
is
seen in
many
little
descriptive passages.
2
Here
is
one showing a "wheat thrashing." This scene, one of the jolliest and most sociable of the western farm, had a charm quite aside from human companionship. The beautiful yellow straw
entering the cylinder the clear, yellow-brown wheat
;
in "Main-Travelled Roads/ by Branch From Hamlin Garland Stone & Kimball. 1893. 2 From Branch Road" in "Main-Travelled Roads," by Hamlin Garland Stone & Kimball. 1893.
1
"A
Road"
"A
54

;
suggestive of the passage of time." "Up the Coulee" is another story of life in the Mississippi valley over which there hangs a Homeric gloom, the gloom of the irretrievable and the fated.
pulsing out at the side the broken straw, chaff and dust puffing out in the great stacker; the cheery whistling and calling of the driver; the keen, crisp air, and the bright sun somehow weirdly
Nowhere have I read a short story more directly, almost brutally told, sparing no detail in the wretched life of the small farmer, his pitiful, un ceasing, but fruitless battle against his lot.
Work,
work, work when the sun beats hot and when the rain pours freely out of the swollen clouds. And
for what
?
The mere struggle

is lost
to exist.
The poetry
of Nature
in the tear-blind sorrow of man.
Two
on the
brothers,
latter s
Howard and Grant McLane meet

farm in the Mississippi
city,
valley.
Howard
has just returned from the
a success
ful actor
behind him. overtures of friendship to his brother Grant, the one who had remained to work on the farm. The latter is cold and bitter. Then Howard seeks at least to make reparation to his old mother.
misery of the
and dramatist. life he had
He
is
sickened at the
so long left
He makes
She readily forgives her son for his long neglect. In an agony of remorse and shame Howard
tries to soften Grant,
again
as
and
at last succeeds.
But
they stand together with clasped hands and Grant has refused all offers of help as unavailing, assert-
STORIES OF
WHEAT AND LUMBER
55
ing that the opportunities once lost are gone forever, the author leaves us in an atmosphere of predestined
misery.
Here is a view of the dullness and sordidness of the farm life.

he waited, he could hear a woman s fretful of kitchen voice, and the impatient jerk and jar The of ill temper or worry. things indicative stood absorbing this farm scene with all longer he
"As
its
sordidness, dullness, triviality and its endless drudgeries, the lower his heart sank. All the joy of
the home-coming was gone, when the figure arose from the cow and approached the gate, and put the i pail of milk down on the platform by the pump."
Farm
work, not of the dainty, pastoral kind that

in, is realistic
2
:
Corydon and Phyllis would delight

ally sketched in the following
"A
farm in the
valley!
Over the mountains
swept jagged, gray, angry, sprawling clouds, send ing a freezing thin dizzle of rain as they passed, upon a man following a plow. The horses had a
sullen
and weary
look,
and
their
manes and
tails
streamed sidewise in the blast. The plow man clad in a ragged gray coat with uncouth, muddy boots upon his feet walked with his head inclined
sleet, to shield his face from the cold and sting of it. The soil rolled away black and Near by, a sticky and with a dull sheen upon it.
towards the
From From
the Coulee" in the same story.

"Up
"Main-Travelled
Roads."
56

cattle
;
boy with tears on his cheeks was watching dog seated near, his back to the gale."
brothers.
Prosperity had made a deep gap between the The one who had remained on the farm barely eked out his existence; the latter was able to
gratify his whim for every luxury. Garland draws a final contrast between them as they stood together in the attitude of reconciliation
:
there, face to face, hands clasped, the one fair-skinned, full-lipped, handsome in his neat suit ; the other tragic, somber in his soft
"The
two men stood
ened mood, his large, long, rugged Scotch face bronzed with sun and scarred with wrinkles that had
histories like saber cuts his
battles."
1
on a veteran, the record of
Although "Among the Corn Rows," another of the stories in the same volume, is a comedy, there is the same recognition of man s struggle for mere existence against nature and our economic system. The scene is laid in Dakota and throughout the tale we are brought in touch with rough
big hearted
and
coarse.
The
men, boisterous, tragic strand is again
monotony. It forms a black, straight-ruled pattern even against the golden background of love.
Imagine a family working in a

following conditions "A corn field in July
:
field
under the
is
a hot place.
The
lazily
soil is
hot and dry
the
wind comes across the

in
mur
muring
i
leaves laden with a

"Up
warm, sickening smell

Travelled
Roads."
From
the
Coulee"
"Main-
STORIES OF
WHEAT AND LUMBER
57
drawn from the rapidly growing, broad-flung ban

ners of the corn; the sun nearly vertical, drops a flood of dazzling light and heat upon the field over
which the cool shadows run, only to make the heat
em more
intense.
In summarizing the work of Mr. Garland for the

ississippi valley,
it
must be confessed that
his
There is no in a species of vivid realism. It is not in our attempt to glossover conditions province in this investigation to probe into economic
power
lies
!"
problems, but the work of Hamlin Garland certainly Not only has the takes a step in that direction.
locality
had an influence upon
this author.
It has
seared
drear hopelessness into his brain. His are no dainty storiettes dealing with the boredom and finesse of those whose fathers earned fortunes for
its
them $hey are the record of homespun lives, the an nals of men whose hands are crusty with weather and toil, whose hearts beat on though numb with
pain.
ume under
William Dean Howells, in the preface to the vol consideration, has so excellent an ap preciation of Garland s work that I may be for
given for quoting
is what they highways in the part of the West that Mr. Garland comes from and writes about; and these stories are full of the bitter and burning dust, the
That
it in part (Main-Travelled Roads)

:
call the
From
"Among
the
Corn
Rows"
in
"Main-Travelled
Roads."
58
foul

the life of the
and trampled slush of the common avenues of men who hopelessly and cheer life, make the wealth that enriches the alien and lessly the idler and impoverishes the producer.
These stories are full of those gaunt, grim, sordid, pathetic, ferocious figures whom our satirists find so easy to caricature as Hayseeds, and whose blind groping for fairer conditions is so
"...
grotesque to the newspapers and so menacing to They feel that something is wrong politicians.
and they know that the wrong
is
not theirs; the
type caught in Mr. Garland s book is not pretty; it is ugly and often ridiculous; but it is heart breaking in
its
rude despair.
II.
Edward^Stewart White was brought up in the lumber regions of Michigan and in a great number of his short stories and novels has dealt with that
*
locality.
Blazer! -Tâjj^ Stories
is
a collection
Of treating mainly the life of the lumber worker. the six stories, two are concerned with other phases
The titles of the other four, life. indicate the close relation they bear to the ever, The Riverman, ber industry. They are
of forest
"
how lum
The
"
Foreman/ The characters and personalities of the men that go to make up a lumber camp are well depicted.
"The
Sealer,"
and
"The
River Boss/
i Preface to "Main-Travelled Kimball. 1893.
Roads."
Edition Stone
&
STORIES OF
The
first
WHEAT AND LUMBER
59
story introduces us to
"Roaring Dick"
Darrel and
Jimmy
Powers, foreman and riverman
respectively. In the kind.
figures of a powerful former great skill and agility in big work had been developed, along with an utter unscrupulousness. In the latter a quiet force, equal
They are both
skill
and iron determination.

need
Both are undemon

is
strative, almost apathetic, but each

rising, if
birling"
be, to the sterner virtues.
capable of In a "log-
contest Darrel fouls Powers

in his
and wins.
Pow ers,
T
During an
Darrel
quiet way, promises to get even. unforeseen jam in the logs a little later,
s life is in danger. Powers saves him and then dryly explains to his questioner that he had merely saved him for the contest of next year.
The author shows a thorough knowledge of the lumber region and the life of the lumber workers. Here is a characteristic description of a scene when logs, jammed together, suddenly break apart and begin to float with the current.
three o clock that afternoon, Jimmie s prediction was fulfilled. Without the slightest warning the jam pulled/ Usually certain pre
"About
monitory cracks, certain sinkings -down, groanings forward, grumblings, shruggings, and sullen, reluc
tant shiftings of the logs give opportunity for the men to assure their safety. This jam, after in
explicably hanging fire for a week as inexplicably started like a sprinter almost into its full gait. The
first
few
tiers
toppled smash into the current, rais-
60
ing a waterspout like that made by a dynamite ex plosion; the mass behind plunged forward blindly
falling, as the integral logs were up turned over, thrust one side or forced bodily ended,
rising
and
into the air
by the mighty power playing jack

1
straws with them/
The theme
"The
of
"The
Foreman"
which follows
Riverman" is
the faithfulness of the Fore
man
to the firm that hires him.
A man
named
Silver Jack, a saloon owner, Richard Darrel while the latter
had once whipped was out on a drink
ing spree in Bay City. On the strength of this victory, he attempts later to pass liquor to the men
Thirty, in charge of Richard Darrel, while are at their work. His object is to demoral they ize the camp, encourage desertions, and reap the
of
Camp
profits
his saloon
which the spending of their earnings in would give him. "That a taste or so
of whisky will shiver the patience of men oppressed B C to the northby long monotony is as
2 country saloon keeper. In an uneven combat against two men, spurred on by his duty to his firm, Richard Darrel pre vails against Silver Jack and his companion and then
"Richard Darrel painfully cleared his eyes and dragged himself to a sitting position, sweeping the blood of his shallow wound from his forehead. He
1
From From
"The
"The
Riverman"
Foreman"
in
"Blazed-Trail Stories," p. 6.
Stories."
in "Blazed-Trail
STORIES OF
WHEAT AND LUMBER
61
searched out the axe.

in the whisky jugs.
it
With it he first smashed Then he wrecked the cutter,
savagely until it was reduced to splin ters and twisted iron. By the time this was done, his antagonists were in the throes of returning
chopping
consciousness.
He
stood
over
them,
dominant,
quick!
menacing.
"
You
t
.
hit th
let
.
back trail/ said he,
damn
Don
you
.
me
And again. against the light Dick of the woods, Ihe incarnation of necessity, 1 the Man defending his Work, the Foreman.
The Foreman
s duties
you round these diggings he stood there, huge, menacing the dominant spirit, Roaring
see
toward the firm are here
valued as more important than life itself. "Roar ing Dick" Darrel, going on a prolonged drunk himself during the off season is one person; Rich ard Darrel smashing the whisky jugs because they
would cripple the efficiency of the workers at his camp, another. The Work becomes the Man. The next study is that of the Sealer," a man whose work plays an important part in the man agement of a lumber camp. We shall permit the
author to recount the sealer
"His
duties for us
business was
of each log, to of board feet put in
by measuring the diameter ascertain and tabulate the number

by the contractor. On the James Bourke, a Foreman,
s
basis of his simple report
would be paid for the season

i
work.
Inevitably
From
"The
Foreman."
62
he at once became James Bourke s natural enemy, and so of every man in the crew with the possible
1 exception of the cook. Fitz Patrick, the sealer, insists in the interest of the firm that the logs be cut carefully. Bourke
and the men resent the fact that he had "culled" a log which he claimed was useless because it had been improperly cut. They decide to maul him
An opportunity arises for them to carry severely. out their designs. Owing to the loose discipline, the men, including the Boss, are all drunk when they beat Fitz Patrick. They leave him frightfully
The cook finds and resus While the former is engaged in mak ing tea, they both notice a wreath of smoke com ing from the direction of the men s cabin. In their drunkenness the crew had overturned the stove and set the cottage on fire. The first impulse of Fitz Patrick is revengeful. He will let them burn. The brutes deserve no better fate. He even
bruised in the snow.
citates him.
threatens the cook with physical injury, should the latter dare to help them. Finally he decides to save them, but not from humanitarian motives
:
"
They can go
finally,
to hell for all of
me/
he an
swered
put in
but
my
people want these logs

s
this winter,
"
and there
nobody
else to
put
them
in
in.
Again faithfulness to the firm and hand is a dominant theme.

"The
to the
work
iFrom
Sealer"
in
"Blazed-Trail
Stories."
STORIES OF
River
WHEAT AND LUMBER

series,
63
In the last of the

Boss,"
the
same
dealing with "The idea is emphasized.
commits a serious misdemeanor in the eyes of the law in order to get his logs to a certain spot within an appointed time limit.
"Jimmy"
|^
Edward Stewart White
has grasped in these
stories the ruling considerations of his locality.
He
knew
He
this
the territory well because he had lived in it. was the first to give expression in fiction to
very picturesque phase of our American life. In each of his stories, it will be the vo
noticed,
revealed as rising dominant over the in dividual characteristics of the man.

is
cation
CHAPTER VI
THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE: THE OLD SOUTH
No
section
of
thusiastic treatment at the
America has received more en hands of her writers

scenery, her pleas
than the South.
Her beauty of
ure-loving, semi-indolent life, her graces, her poetry, her attitudes have all received sympathetic and
loving portrayal.
$The
book by which George

to this
W.
first
Cable
is
best
known even
short stories
day
life
is
the
of a series of
to
and novels by him, attempting

Louisiana,^
picture a phase of of the Creoles of
that has passed away, that hejoJ^01d Creole
W
4
Days
waspublished in 1879jt opened an~entrance
into a hitherto~"unexplored
and unexploited field. The author had an intimate knowledge of the Creole character and had felt the magic of the peculiar
dialect spoken musically by these half-French na For the benefit of those not familiar with
"Creole"
tives.
the term
it might be said right here used by Cable to signify a white man or woman, of French descent and untainted by the admixture of any negro blood.
that
it is
"Madame Delphine," the
opening story has
its
64

setting
65
Orleans of long ago. The theme is racial, presenting in the plot develop ment based upon it the rigors of both law and between a white public opinion against a marriage woman of mixed blood. The society man and a The quaint of the day is reconstructed for us.
in
the
New
streets of
Orleans, the rapture of Southern musical patois of the natives are all scenery, the The locality here as in Mrs. faithfully reproduced. best stories is not only a setting for the Freeman s action but an integral part of the motives inciting
New
the characters.
Madame
Delphine, the suffering
Jean quadroone; Pere Jerome, the kindly priest; the village notary; Doctor Varillat; Thompson, a truth Capitaine le Maitre are all drawn with
of delineation arising from a knowledge of the out neighborhood and the big passions that grew in the South. of the race question
of the best bits of description in the story that which pictures a Southern night :
One
"It
is
Southern nights under sterner energies of the mind whose spell all the cloak themselves and lie down in bivouac, and the
was one
of those
fancy and the imagination that cannot sleep, slip their fetters and escape, beckoned away from be hind every flowering bush and sweet-smelling tree
and every stretch of lonely, half-lighted walk, by the genius of poetry. The air stirred softly now and then, and was still again as if the breezes lifted their expecting pinions and lowered them
66
silence,
once more, awaiting the rising of the moon in a which fell upon the fields, the roads, the gardens, the walls, and the suburban and half-
suburban streets, like a pause in worship. And anon she rose. Monsieur Vignevielle s steps were bent toward the more central part of the town when, just within this enclosure and almost overhead, in the dark boughs of a large orange tree, a mocking bird began the first low flute notes of his all-night
"
song."
any more rapturous setting than this? It reminds one of Maupassant s famous sketch "Le clair de la lune" in which a crabbed
love have
Can
old priest realizes for the first time why moon This passage reveals light was given to the earth.
Cable as a
man who saw
his locality
through the
is
eyes of a prose poet. "Posson Jone" in the same volume
another
Orleans story dealing with the picturesque is a Northerner, a parson, The hero of about 1820. who has been entrusted with church funds and
has come to
New
New
Orleans on a
St.
visit.
There he
meets a typical scamp, Jules plays the part of a confidence man. He succeeds in get ting the parson drunk but fails to get the money which had been stealthily hidden away by the
parson
i
Ange, who
slave.
Even
in his fall
from grace the
parson gives such evidences of nobility, that the vol-
From
"Madame Delphine"
in
"Old
Creole
Days."

atile
67
and emotional
Creole, St. Ange,
is
influenced
to begin his reformation. In the course of the narrative a bull fight is well
This sketch like described, also a gambling den. the preceding one gives ample evidence of inspira tion for theme and plot development from the life
of
New
Orleans.
as
it
The
local color in all of Cable s
were, the flesh and blood of the is, narrative itself and not merely a garment.
stories
The heroic
casion calls
it
self-sacrifice of the Creole
when
oc
forth
is
the theme of Cable
s "Jean
This is a very dramatic story. -ah-Poquelin. The action takes place at a time when New Orleans was outgrowing its old bounds, the marshes were
"
being
filled
up and new
"ah"
streets
laid.
Jean-ah-
in the middle by way of deri Poquelin (the resists the progressive invaders to no avail. sion)
later, is that he had been on his premises a brother who secretly harboring was a leper. The setting, the customs and manners portrayed, form an integral part of the story. V That Cable s success in throwing vivid views of New Orleans upon the screen was not an acci dent but the result of conscious artistic striving
The
reason, as
we learn
to paint each thing
"as
he sees
:
it,"
is
attested
by
Laf cadio Hearn.

"The
He
says
sharp originality of Mr. Cable s descrip Old tions should have convinced the reader of
Creole Days,
i
l
that the scenes of his stories are
by
Century Magazine, November, 1883.
68

;
no means fanciful
have resided in
and the
is
strict perfection of his
Creole architecture
New
readily recognized by all who Each one of those Orleans.
charming pictures of places veritable pastels was painted after some carefully selected model of French or Franco-Spanish origin, typifying fashions of building which prevailed in Colonial
7
days/
Canby in "The Short Story in English" places the same high estimate on the local color of Cable s
work:
"It
is
the descriptive element, however, which

s
is
most valuable in Cable
works: such local color

of
as arises
from the unforgettable characterizations
Mine. Delphine, of Jean-ah-Poquelin, of Tite the picture of a semi-tropical life and the Poulette
;
atmosphere of a vanishing civilization. Next in value is the tender sentiment proper to, and worthy Abstract this and the local of, such descriptions. 1 color from the stories and what have you left ? As a final tribute to Mr. Cable s work in local
"
fiction it
might be permitted to quote the following estimate of his achievements by J. K. Aetherhigh

ill:
larity of
Bret Harte has done for the stern angu Western life, Mr. Cable has wrought, in infinitely finer and subtler lines for his soft-fea tured and passionate native land. Those who come after him in delineation of Creole character can
"What
i
Canby:
"The
Short Story in
English,"
p. 320.

belongs the credit of striking this
rich in promise and fulfillment. Thomas Nelson Pa, although
69
only be followers in his footsteps, for to him alone
new
vein,
so
also writing of
the South has chosen Virginia as the locality for There is a strain of regret for the his settings.
his stories. passing of the "good old times" in for an excellent portrayal We are indebted to Page of plantation life in the Southern states. The negro
dialect is used as a vehicle for telling these storiesjf turn our attention first to "MehJ[jady
We
not so much because the plot jjftory of the War," is exceptionally Southern but because the characters chosen and their manner of speaking is so thor
oughly
local.
The motif of the story is the faithfulness of Old Uncle Billy, a negro, to his mistress and her daughter. The splendor and affluence and happi
ness of the old plantation days
is
Desolation, havoc, and war come on. tation is stripped of all its belongings
fields
touched upon. The old plan

:
horses stolen,
trampled upon, negroes freed or lured away.
War in
all its horrors is scorching the land. Patriotism to the Southern cause is revealed at
white heat.
No
sacrifice is too great for its friends
and no parley can be had with its enemies. And when, as in this little tale, love and patriotism clash
there
is
material for a story of strong emotion.

at 1888.
Home."
iln
"Authors
Edited
Co.
by
Jeanette
and
Joseph Gilder
Cassel
&
P. 57.
70

Uncle Billy,
like
typical servitor
Sam in "Marse Chan/ is who has grown gray serving
the
his
master and mistress and whose allegiance is proof against poverty and the lures of freedom itself. He dreams of the old days almost as the French emigre dreamed of the splendid reign of Louis XIV. Night has fallen over the scene and the old
negro muses in these words: An dat night when de preacher was gone wid he wife an Hannah done dropt off to sleep, I was settin in de do wid meh pipe, an I heah em settin dyah on de front steps, dee voices soun in low like bees, an de moon sort o meltin over
de yard, and I sort o got to studyin pear like de plantation live once mo
ain
,
no more scufflin an de ole back agin, an I heah meh kerridge horses stompin in de stalls, an de place all cleared up agin, an de fence all roun de pahsture, an I smell de wet clover-blossoms right good, an Marse Phil an Meh Lady done come back an runnin all roun me, climbin up on meh knees, callin me "Unc Billy, an pesterin me to go fishin while somehow Meh
an hit an de times done come

,
Lady an de Cun
voice
l,
settin
like
hummin
"
low
dyah on de steps wid de water runnin in de
dark
Does not Page seem to be the minstrel of days gone by calling up reminiscence after reminisi
In
"In
Ole
Virginia"
Charles Scribner
Sons.
1892.
71
cence of the past ? The short story, allowing, even demanding a strong impression is a very good medium for that purpose. Marse_Chaji!llagreat many critics consider
It is
supposedly told to a
traveler by an old negro who had been Marse Chan s (Channing s) body servant. The time of the action begins just before the Civil War and
ends at the
fall of
Richmond.
It is
very dramatic
ally told in negro dialect. The setting is an old Virginia plantation in ante
bellum times, also a

life
battlefield.
We
get a glimpse
and of the Southern family feuds, of plantation sometimes began over mere trifles and em which bittered all the members of both families against
*
another during their progress. The storyjllustrates not only the affection of the ThemcTW in ^"Meh negrcT for his master (same ffie sense of honor in the South Eady")
oiie
butjtlsp
ern gentleman and the master

slaves?
devotion to his
the rescue of a
One
"of "the
incidents
is
negro slave,
The
Fisher, by his brave master. are typically Southern. They are characters
Ham
a^flery blooded, honor Southern gentleman Miss able, devoted, courageous Anne, a plantation lily, a typical Southern girl, Old Colonel beautiful, imperious, proud of family Southern democrat, an intense par Chamberlain, a Sam, an old negro body tisan, violent in debate
as follows:
Marse
"Chan,
servant of Marse Chan; faithful Judy,
Sam
wife
72
s maid, Marse Chan s parents, a loyal Southern couple. Although the main theme is romantic love, the story is realistically treated. The author has been
and Anne
at great pains to give
a faithful picture of
life
in
Old Virginia even down to the matter of dialect. In a preliminary note, Mr. Page draws a distinc tion between the negro dialect of Virginia and that of Louisiana. The title of the volume is in itself
the best evidence that the source of inspiration for Mr. Page was his native This state, Virginia. is confirmed by reference tJr The Old South," his book of essays. letter Tound in the breast pocket of a soldier who had been killed at the
battle of
Seven Pines furnished the seed plot for
the story.
"The Old South," to which reference has just been made, contains an essay called "Social Life Before the War." 1 This is written in a vein of
regretful memory. The picture drawn seems al most an idealization and yet it has the artist touch
of true conviction.
thrilled
subtly yet powerfully the
Upon reading memory
it
we
see
how
of the old life
Mr. Page.
the essay we gather that the life was one of refinement and hospitality; that the husband
philosopher,
i "Social
feouth,"
From
adored his wife who was not only his "guide, friend," but the head of all his maLife Before the
T. Nelson
War:"
by
Page
an essay from "The Old Charles Scribner s Sons. 1892.

\
73
/terial affairs; that the negro,

!
although he worked
after.
hard, was contented,
happy and looked
It
I
/[
was, according to Page, a life rich in the blessings of content and good fellowship. The author con-
eludes
|
*
It has passed
its
from the
benignant influence behind
earth, but it has left it to sweeten and to
its children. The ivory palaces have been destroyed, but myrrh, aloes, and cassia still breathe amid the dismantled ruins." *
sustain
Enough has been adduced
to
show that Page was
inspired to his work by the associations of his native state. If the love for the South be the
passionate, intense feeling which
is his, it is
no won
der that even children shouldered arms to protect her when they thought her rights were denied.
French
critic,
Madame
Therese Blanc claims
that Page was the first to present the South favor ably before the tribunal of the North. She says:
cotes il doit y avoir une part d exde prejuges tout naturels mais si Mme. ageration, Beecher Stowe a gagne triomphalement un grand
"Des
;
deux
proces qui etait celui de Thumanite tout entiere, le merite d avoir rectifie bien des traits grossis pour
les besoins
de la cause reste a M. Page. 2 Another writer whom the South "made"îsjoel

If
to
C/hanjler _Hams,
the
short-story
in
"The
reader
South,"
1 From "The South Before the by Thomas Nelson Page. 2
War"
Old
"Questions
"L
Americains,"
par
Mme.
The"re"se
Blanc.
Es
say
Amerique d
autrefois."
P. 65.
74
Cable stands for Louisiana, and Page for Virginia, Harris certainly represents__Georgia. His knowl
home locality is deep, his sympathy edge of with the negro genuine and profound. Had he never written anything other than Uncle Remus
the"
* *
his position as an interpreter of his native state and as a writer of national reputation would he
was singularly adapted to fit him Erastus Brainerd, who contributes the sketch of "Joel Chandler Harris" for "Authors
secure.
His
life
for his work.
at
"For
Home, in speaking of his personal habits says amusement he hunted rabbits with a pack
:
of half-bred harriers, or listened to the tales of the plantation negro, who was there to be found in primitive perfection of type. It was on the Turner
plantation that the original his stories to the little boy.
Uncle Remus told So it was that he absorbed the wonderfully complete stores of knowl edge of the negro which have since given him fame.
He heard the negro s stories and enjoyed them, ob served his characteristics and appreciated them." He enjoyed the privilege of studying his charac
ters first hand.
Through
this,
he was enabled to
write his masterpiece, "Uncle Remus," which shows so intimate a knowledge of the negro and his point
of view.
Remus" are the traest ex )^The legends of "Uncle pression of the negro character. "Uncle Tom s Cabin" as a novel and "My Old Kentucky Home"
i
In
"Authors
at
Home"
Jeannette L. Gilder.
75
as a song are both idealizations. Neither one is popular with the negro. Both represent the white
man
dream for him.
But
in the stories of
"Uncle.
Brer RabbrTis^his own hero. The mix ture of shrewcTneslTand helplessness perhaps gives
Remus,"
the ingredients in the character of the plantation
negro himself. Uncle Remus is a slave who is favored by his mistress because he had seen her grow up from childhood to womanhood. The little Boy whose
questions elicit his delightful stories is probably a son of the master. In a series of legends Uncle Remus recounts the adventures of Brer Rabbit,
Brer Fox, Brer Coon and many other animals. These creatures are but thinly disguised, individu
alized
human
beings.
It is the
negro himself who

his
under the mask of the various animals reveals
own
interesting personality.
traits as
His
we
see
them through the medium

follows:
of
"Uncle
Remus"
are as
He
is
super
a
stitious,
credulous,
a good story
teller,
good
singer, mildly arrogant on account of self-esteem arising from his position in the household, faithful
to his mistress
and master, a lover of children and handy man of all work. The duties of Uncle Remus were sundry and
varied.
Being the household favorite he was given all things and free rein to do as he pleased. In "How the Birds Talk" his services are enumerated:
general supervision over
76
"He did no great amount of work, but lie was never wholly idle. He tanned leather, he made shoes, he manufactured horse collars, fish baskets, foot mats, scouring mops, and ax handles for sale
he had his OAvn watermelon and cotton patches; he fed the hogs, looked after the cows and sheep,
and, in short, was the busiest person on the plan
1
tation."
The dramatis per sonce
of these sketches are the
possum, coon, polecat, owl, rabbit, wolf, snake, mink, buzzard and terrapin. The setting is some times a plantation and sometimes a swamp. Each animal is strongly individual in character. I have
attempted to get the essential attribute of each one.
Judging them from

they
1.
their actions in all of the stories

:
may
be classified as follows
2.
Brer Rabbit: shrewd, roguish. Brer Fox: thievish, tricky, not generally suc Brer Brer Brer Brer Brer Brer
cessful.
3. 4. 5.
6.
Wolf a gourmand, clumsy.

:
Polecat
arrogant.
Owl
mysterious.
7. 8.
Snake: sleek, revengeful. Buzzard a knave, but good natured.

:
Terrapin
stupid.
It will be seen at a glance that this array of
animals
is
portrayed from direct observation of
various negro types.

i "How
away."
the Birds
Talk,"
p. 109, in "Daddy
Jake, the
Run
77
The value of these sketches as a contribution to American literature has by no means been over In discussing the standing of Joel Chand looked. ler Harris in American literature William Malone
Baskervill, a Southern critic says:
the honor Uncle Remus, a veritable Ethio pian Êsop, philosopher and gentleman, and to the Little Boy whose inexhaustible curiosity and eagerness to hear a story have called forth the
"
to
Putnam County was awarded
of giving birth to
most valuable and in the writer s opinion, the most permanent contribution to American litera
1 ture in the last quarter of this century. In another story, "jjaddy Jake, the Runaway/*
Harris departs from his familiar legends to tell a story in which the main character is a runaway of ne slave. "Daddy Jake" belongs to the class
groes
seer
who
ill
are very well treated
by
their masters
and completely
relied upon. ignorant over uses Daddy Jake, so that the latter hits
An
him on the head with a farming implement.

overseer
is
The
merely stunned, but the negro believes
him dead.
meted out to negroes who
punishment men and therefore runs away and hides in Hudson s Cane Brake, a secret meeting place for runaways. The children of Dr. Gaston, to whom "Daddy"
strike white
1 J. C. Harris, by William Malone Baskervill Barbee Smith, Nashville, f enn. P. 3. 2 Century Co. 1889. "Daddy Jake, the Runaway"
He knows
the
terrible
&
78
belonged, are very lonesome without their old friend and go "down the river" without the knowledge
of their parents, to search for him. How he is brought back by them and happiness restored con
stitutes
Jake"
the rest of the story.
Besides
"Daddy
whose faithfulness and love of children are

characteristic
qualities,
very
a
is
woman named
a half -demented
"Crazy Sue" is
pictured.
She
woman who had been cruelly treated by her master and had run away. She tells the little children a story about Brer Rabbit and Brer Coon. The setting is in Putnam county, the state of
of the big plantation the hot cotton fields.
Georgia, in ante-bellum times. get the spirit and the "niggers" toiling on
is
We
toward them
ness.
a mixture of brutality
The attitude of the whites and kind
Th.ejQolpnd Vlggger
"
pog
The scene
of action is in Georgia. AUnlike Cable s stories, the setting is not especially emphasized, but the
development of the plot takes into account the relations between master and slave in the days
before the war.
The character of the faithful but proud negro slave overseer, his domination over
the rest of the negroes, their subservience, Southern politeness and hospitality are all well portrayed
or suggested.
i
The story
of the
relates
how
the master
War,"
From
"Tales
Home
Folks in Peace and in
by
J. C. Harris.

pursued
79
Ms
erring but faithful slave with a beagle
When he finds especially trained to catch negroes. him and is about to lash him severely, the old
by
family servant hands his master a letter written his dead mistress, the present master s mother. In the letter she tells her son to have great patience
her.
with the negro because of his faithful services to Of course the son relents, the negro is for
given and peace is established. In the following passage from "The Colonel s we learn how dogs were trained Nigger Dog
"
for negro hunting "The colonel trained

:
him
assiduously.
Twice a
day he d hold Jeff and make one of the little negroes run down by the spring-house and out
across the
cow lot. "When the little negro was well out of sight the Colonel would unleash Jeff and away the miniature hunt would go across the fields,
the Colonel cheering it on in regulation style." 1 "A Baby in the Siege," represents a dramatic situation at the siege of Atlanta; "The Comedy
of
portrays a scene between the two con flicting parties on neutral ground; "A Bold De
War"
serter,"
pictures the hardships of conscription in
middle Georgia. Although these and others in the same volume are good stories showing ability to handle plot and to suggest suitable backgrounds,
they are not the distinct and individual contribu-
iFrom
Harris.
"The
Colonel s
"
Nigger Dog,
by Joel Chandler
80

which
"Uncle
tion of Joel Chandler Harris to
ture
Remus"
American litera must ever be. He
will always hold his place along with the other
unperishable characters of
eyes of the white men.
itself
fiction.
Thus far we have seen the South through the

Fortunately the negro race
has produced
its
own interpreter^J?.ulJJaur
stories has
rejle_r)jiiibar, poet
and writer of short
told with no
mean
moral, social and

negro.
is
literary skill of the spiritual, domestic life of the Southern
The book in which most

is
of his prose
work
*
calledJIInjQlcL Plantation Days. In a series of sketches about negroes, he gives brief snatches and episodes of their lives in
form.
contained
They are very
short-story subtle in their delineation
Y The negroes as Paul Laurence Dunbar depicts /them are faithful, shrewd, sentimental and much
given to aping their masters. They are very sus ceptible to religious emotion and respond very The humor and fun of readily to the revivalist.
well brought out. Strangely enough (judging from the race of the author) there is no sentimentality in his stories
the
character. pf negro
old
plantation
life
is
and very little subjective writing. Stories told accurately and faithfully but objectively. where does the author intrude himself.
are
No
The opening
i
"In
"
story,
Aunl-JLempe
&
Triumph,"
Old Plantation Days," by Paul Laurence Dunbar Dodd, Mead & Co. 1903.
THE DAYS THAT AKE NO MORE

is
81
She whose imperious privi leges and rights (generically) we have learned to know from the work of Harris and Page. In this case she insists on giving away Miss Liza in mar
is
a study of the faithful family servant.

"
a plantation
mammy"
riage herself, claiming the privilege as due to her, because she brought her up from infancy. The
owner, Stuart Mordaunt, a widower, is represented as being very amenable to her guidance. In an other story "Aunt Tempe s Revenge" a negress
named Lucy
is
introduced whose hatreds have a

is
primitive African fierceness. The emotional negro character
seen to best
advantage at a revival meeting. Thus from JAIn the Walls of Jericho" we get an excellent picture oTthe negro In the stress of a religious frenzy. A
preacher
named Johnson uses truly theatrical means to gain and hold his congregation. He has them howling, dancing and eating while they march
about imaginary walls of Jericho. Not only do we get an insight into
how the negroes spent their spare time from IHow Brother from Grace," but we also get an un PaiikeiL^Fell^
usually well-defined^portrait of a typical negro preacher. In the heat of his zeal for reforming
his flock,
Brother Parker steals into a smokehouse and catches some of his parishioners playing cards on Sunday.
One
of the culprits,
Mandy
Jim,
accuses the preacher of denouncing card playing because he himself had been unsuccessful at it.

Angry at the taunt, the Preacher declares that he can play better than Mandy s Jim and is willing to prove it "fu de Gospel s sake." While they are playing at high-low-jack, Brother Parker s master appears and puts the wrong construction on the scene. All is afterwards
explained and Brother Parker is exonerated. His zeal and ruffled dignity are well portrayed. Brother Parker, who is willing to play with Satan for the sake of the is a most Lord, delightful crea
tion.
Lastly
"The
we
get the
comedy
of plantation life in
Trouble_About Sophiny" and "A Supper by The former deals with the question of social primacy between the Butler and the Coach man. Both desire to invite Sophiny, a negro wait
Proxy."
ing maid to a ball given by the "Quarters." It decided that the question of who should ask her first be decided When the battle has been fistically.
is
waged, much to their mutual harm, they are chargrined to find that a field hand, Sam, had anticipated both of them and had been accepted by the fickle Sophiny. In "A Supper by Proxy,"
the negro butler, Anderson, pompously imperson ates his master during the latter s supposed absence, /but is caught at it, much to his discomfiture.
Dunbar has faithfully presented the aspects of the life he saw, the life of which he himself was a part. He is the only author who has given us the negro in the short story from the
Paul Laurence
83
negro s own standpoint. It is surprising to find how very much akin his point of view is to that He sees the lights and the of the white writers. shadows, the humors and the sorrows, the comedies
and the tragedies of the negro quarter both fairly and sympathetically. Skillfully, he avoids the pit
fall of sentimentality,
writing with an artistic re straint and an objectivity which are in every way admirable.
CHAPTER
IN
VII
KENTUCKY AND TENNESSEE

of
THE fame
James Lane Allen
rests
mainly upon
his strong Kentucky novels but in his short-story work as well he emphasizes the fact that the lo
cality
{ *
can furnish considerable stimulus and in
spiration to a writer.
is the name of a volume Flute and Violin that contains a collection of stories. They all deal with his native country, the blue-grass region of
Kentucky, and its picturesque folk. In the title story, the main character is a Ken tucky parson. He is shown in the midst of his
parish working quietly, kindly in spirit and solici tous of his parishioners welfare. His struggles to have the church endowed are typical of any small
community. The place of the action is Lexington, Kentucky, and the time, at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The parson, Reverend Moore, is a simple character who, through an oversight has committed a wrong. The
story although true to its locality is only mildly in dicative of Allen s strong trend in the direction of
Kentucky characterizations and Kentucky word
84
IN
pictures.

Far
better
*
85
is another story in the same The prin Solomon ofJKentujfe* C( cipal character, in mockery called King Solomon," He is sold is a vagrant of Lexington, Kentucky. in the market place as a shiftless character and bought by a negress, old Aunt Charlotte. She has memories of King Solomon as a neighbor of her former master s. A pestilence breaks out upon the
volume,
"King
town.
Even the gravediggers flee. Seized by a sudden noble resolution, King Solomon, the vag rant, decides to stay, takes his mattock and spade and inters the dead who otherwise would have been
left
unburied.
.The characters of the story, typical of Kentucky, are:

1. King Solomon, originally a Virginian who had migrated to Kentucky and fallen upon evil ways. 2. Aunt Charlotte, an old negress, the personi
fication of faithfulness.
This characteristic
all
is
es
pecially emphasized
3. 4.
5.
by
Southern writers.
sale.
Adolphe Xaupi, a dancing master. The Sheriff who conducts the slave
are present at the sale.
Medical students, a happy, irresponsible lot
who
The action takes place at the time when Henry Clay was in his prime. The status of the town is indicated in the following sentence from the
story
there
:
"Yes,
the
summer
of
1833 was at hand, and
must be new
pleasures,
new
luxuries;
for
86

x
Lexington was the Athens of the West and the
Kentucky
Birmingham."
all
But the best of and one especially
the stories in the volume

>
indicative of Allen s peculiar
strength is "Two Gentlemenj)fJpTi tn pfcy_ It i s a pathetic narralfveôf the relations existing be
tween a faithful slave and
his former master. Colonel Fields stands out like a portrait of
Old
Rem
brandt s: quaint, gentle, polite, his vision turned toward the past. Peter Cotton, the former slave and negro preacher is hardly less distinct. The
splendors of the old regime of the happy, plan tation life under the reign of a kind master are
sympathetically portrayed. "Wheat fields, singing negro laborers, the gentle old colonel and his faith ful body servant, blend together in a harmonious Like Page s stories of Virginia it breathes picture.
a sigh for the passing of the old times, but with
an implied acknowledgment that the new era

rightfully in
its
is
place.
VThe
descriptions of the blue-grass country are
Admirably done, especially the scene when the Col onel leaves his old homestead. There is a poetic
fervor in each reminiscent detail:
universe and left
Eternal Power seemed to have quitted the all Nature folded in the calm of the Eternal Peace. Around the pale-blue dome
"The
of the heavens, a few pearl-colored clouds

"King Solomon of lin/ by James Lane Allen.
hung
From
Kentucky" in
"Flute
and Vio
IN
87
motionless, as though the wind had been withdrawn Not a crimson leaf floated down to other skies. ward through the soft silvery light that filled the
atmosphere and created the sense of lonely, un imaginable spaces. The light overhung the farrolling landscape of field and meadow and wood, crowning with faint radiance the remoter lowswelling hilltops and deepening into dreamy * shadows on their eastern slopes. This is a description in which words are ver
itable artists
this
must have
man who writes like pigments. felt the magic of his native scenes.
Colonel Fields revolves the old times in his memory. Once more the magic of the old life is thrown over
them.
".
He
.
.
sees the old plantation as it

silent fields
The
was around him seemed again

:
with negroes singing as they followed the plows down the corn rows or swung the cradles through the bearded wheat. Again in a frenzy of
alive
merriment the strains of the old
fiddles issued
from
crevices of cabin doors to the rhythmic beat of hands and feet that shook the rafters and roof.
Now
he was sitting on his porch, and one little negro was blackening his shoes, another leading his saddle horse to the stiles, a third bringing his hat, and a fourth handing him a glass of ice-cold sanhis garee or now he lay under the locust trees in in the drowsy heat of the sumyard falling asleep
;
From
"Two
Gentlemen of
Kentucky"
in
"Flute
and Vio
lin."

mer afternoon while one waved over him a bough
pungent walnut leaves, until he lost conscious and by and by awoke to find that they both had fallen asleep side by side on the grass and that the abandoned fly-brush lay full across his
ness,
face."
of
not necessary to quote any further in or/aer to prove the fact that James Lane Allen is a magician of landscape. To him his native fields
is
Y It
and
a
hills
and
valleys are all beautiful
tale
to
tell.
He
sees
and all have them through a poet s
into his stories through they run like threads of purest gold. ^liich I This unusual ability to depict the Kentuckian
glasses
and weaves them
/And his land has attracted a great deal of notice from critics. Summarizing his value to the de velopment of the local story in the United States,
E. A. Bennett says:
"In
reading him one
is
made
is
conscious of the
fact that the United States
not a single country

its
but several.
its
Kentucky, with
glorious
grass,
ancient homesteads and hospitality, its Roman delight in fine roads; Kentucky, which, with a population of only two millions, has only one town of over five thousand inhabitants seems as unlike
land
the America of our imagination as old Middle Eng itself. Indeed, it is a true offshoot of old
England, descended by way of Virginia, and one

i
From
"Two
Gentlemen of
Kentucky"
in
"Flute
and Vio
lin."
IN
89
has a comfortable suspicion that

is
ing the real,
New York
this, and not roar nor Chicago affronting the skies, valid America. 1
Another tribute to the powers of James Lane is paid by Mr. Mabie: Nature furnishes a background of many charm ing American stories, and finds delicate and effec tive remembrance in the hands of writers like Miss Jewett and Miss Murfree; but in Mr. Allen s ro mances, Nature is not behind the action she is in
Allen
*
;
volved in
it.
Her presence
is
everywhere; her
influence streams through the story; the deep and prodigal beauty which she wears in rural Kentucky
shines on every page; the tremendous forces which sweep through her disclose their potency in human
passion and impulse.
From Kentucky
distance nor
is
to Tennessee is not a
very great
any discernible gap in the of Charles Egbert Craddock (Miss Mary artistry Noailles Murfree) and James Lane Allen. The former has gathered inspiration from her Tennes see mountains as the latter did from his Kentucky meadows. She has expressed herself through the
there
medium
lection,
"In
of the short story as he did. Her col the Tennessee Mountains" contains
eight studies of the rude mountaineers, reproducing

1
"Concerning
James Lane
Allen"
from
"Fame
and Fic
1901. P.
tion,"
by E. A. Bennett
E. P. Dutton
&
Co.
174.
2
Pilgrimages."
Quoted from The Outlook by E. F. Harkins in Boston: L. C. Page & Co. 1902.
"Little
90
their language and suggesting a tremendous latent power both in the men and in the mountain scenery. For the actions of men, especially if they lead to somber or tragic consequences, the mountains are an impressive theater. They rear mass upon mass of shaggy sides to the skies. An artist cannot help them. But he must have in being impressed by deed a large brush and a vast imagination to paint
Sun their scenes with the necessary heroic stroke. rise and sunset, extending their pageantry of color
over crag and chasm, tinting the heights and reach ing into the abysses, are the spotlights of God over
a stage on which great elemental passions their part.
may
play
/
f
DriftingjnowTi Lost
Ciree"!?"
is
a powerful story
wKich the mountains and their environment seem more than a setting. Pine Mountain, rising in the distance and never changing, towers cold and in exorable, and the creek winding down from the summit and lost at the base, is like life itself, mys
in
terious,
with
its
desolation of mankind.
happiness vanishing forever to the The little odds and ends on
the surface, the flotsam and jetsam drifting into that unknown haven are our vanished opportuni
ties or
cherished dreams unrealized. The characters are the inhabitants of the moun tains, primitive men and women, leading routine,
uneventful
in
lives.
Gossip
is
New
England, and for the same
as dearly relished as Civili reason.

;
zation has not altogether penetrated machinery and
IN
91
But the mountains are still crude. some natures, steadfast as themselves, the home of men imbued with great ambitions, women capable
agriculture are
of great self-sacrifice. as follows:
The persons
in the story are

talent
Vander Price
Cynthia
young blacksmith, with a
for mechanical contrivance.
Ware
a simple mountain girl
who
loves
Vander Price and makes a great sacrifice for him. Cynthia s mother a shrewd mountain woman,
shrewish in temper, smokes a pipe occasionally.
parents very ignorant. They fail to understand their son s ambition. Outlook on the
s
Vander
is
world
narrow and wrong. 1

all
The spoken language of
the characters
is
is
the
more easily Tennessee dialect of the whites. It understood by the general reader than the talk of Page s Virginia negroes. The opening description is very impressive and
characteristic
of
s
the best descriptive touches in
Miss Murfree
1
work.
High above Lost Creek Valley towers a wilder
So dense is this growth that it masks ness of pine. Even when the the mountain whence it springs.
Cumberland spurs
to the east are
gaunt and bare in
the wintry wind, their deciduous forests denuded,

their crags unveiled and grimly beetling, Pine mountain remains a somber, changeless mystery its
;
From
"In
the Tennessee
)
Mountains,"
by Charles Egbert
Craddock (Miss Murf ree
Houghton
Mifflin
&
Co.
1884.
92
clifty heights are hidden, its chasms and abysses lurk unseen. Whether the skies are blue or gray,
the
dark austere
1
line
of
its
summit
limits
the
horizon.
rier."
It stands
against the west like a bar
In theme the story deals with the change that comes over the mountain youth, Vander Price, when his mechanical work gains recognition in the
town.
evitable
It is the old motif: forgotten love
and
for
gotten duties.
The action marches on
to its in
hopeless conclusion, symbolized by the Creek which winds down the mountain side and
mysteriously disappears. An intensely dramatic gambling story isuliQld. 2 with a mountain setting
for
its
action.
There
is
a good account of a card
the mingled light of the moon and the fire of pine knots. The passion of the loser, his shrieks echoing and reechoing among the moun
game played by
tains
and the weirdness of the
entire scene are well
described.
Throughout the story are occasional pictures of the mountain scenery that impress the reader with a sense of grandeur and awe-inspiring mystery.
great social difference sometimes comes be

lives
tween two
and eventually
girl
is
results in tragic
all
consequences.
1
If a
untutored in
in
"In
but
From
From
"Drifting
Down
Lost
Creek"
the Tennessee
Mountains." 2 "In
the Tennessee
Mountains."
IN
mountain

lore
93
culture, in "The Star jn_the_ Valley
and her potential lover is a man of the story must take the course that it does
."
To a huntsman camping on a crag at a very high at elevation the lighted room of a mountain girl She is the in the valley. night appeared as a star but cap daughter of a blacksmith, unsophisticated moral heights. able in her own way of rising to great
She tramps
deadly the hunter
cation
fifteen miles in a
snowstorm
to save
three men from being killed as the result of a Her hopeless, unexpressed love for feud.
of edu separated from her by abysses

social station
is
the theme of the story. of her Again the authoress shows the inspiration mountains. The story is replete with pictures of wild scenery at all seasons. In one paragraph the
and
central idea is clearly defined: "There are many things that suffer
unheeded
in those mountains, the birds that freeze on the trees ; the wounded deer that leaves its cruel kind
to
die alone; the despairing flying fox with its And the pursuing train of savage dogs and men.
the camp fire she jutting crag whence had shone had so often watched her star, set forever looks far over the valley beneath where in one of those
sad
little
rural graveyards she had been laid so long

actors in the
Star in the
ago."*
The other
iFrom
"A
mountain tragedy
in
"In
be-
Valley"
the Tennessee
Mountains."
94

Jerry Shaw the drunken black Chevis the sophisticated
sides the girl are
smith, the girl s father. dilettante hunter.

taineers
silent.
7
In the background one gets a view of the wives and
moun
and
mothers-in-law, apathetic
^V
/]
Fifteen years after the appearance of "In the Tennessee Mountains/ "The Bushwackers" was published (1899). * This is
The setting is in the Tennessee mountains story. and the action takes place during the war. There are some striking descriptions especially one of eagles and their brood on a mountain top. The title is derived from the name given to the band of reckless and
irresponsible foragers
who
plundered both North and South alike. The hero is taken through the greater part of the war and
incidents recounting his bravery are related, including the final episode in which he loses his arm through the rascality of a comrade./ That the authoress knows her territory can be readily seen, but that the story is loosely constructed is also alas too evident. It seems to lack the unity of her earlier efforts and shows a poor sense of pro portion. Hilary s love for Delia is a trivial affair as compared with the passion depicted in "Drift ing Down Lost Creek All the incidents previous to Hilary s meeting with the Bushwackers and to
many
IN

man who had
95
his saving the life of the
ruined
his arm seem entirely irrelevant in the develop ment of a short story. The expository ending is
and inartistic. But in spite of all faults whatever excellences are to be found these
old-fashioned are those that come from a thorough knowledge of the locality, its scenes and its characters.
Hilary s old mother, who deliberately plans against her son s going to war, is a good bit of characterzation.
In
The story deals ject of illicit distilling is treated. sudden" wave of reform that spread over wftirthe the little mountain community and led to the expul
sion of the Brice Brothers, distillers, who frequently became intoxicated with their own products. The
the firing plot is well developed through the climax, for expulsion from church. of the church, in revenge very good description in the story is that of
a train passing at night over a railroad bridge that spans a chasm.
One more
story of Miss Murfree

2
s,
"Election-
eerin on Big Injun Mounting," of leave tê "subject. J^rKeTgnorance

eer
and we "must the mountain
and yet
his susceptibility to noble influences is
well brought out.
Rufe Chadd, a candidate for
reelection as attorney-general has a reputation for extreme severity in the pursuit of justice. He is
1
2
In
"In
From
"In
the Tennessee Mountains." the Tennessee Mountains."
96
the deed and
stabbed by a drunkard, Isaac Bowker, who avows is held in captivity. Rufe, in the
expectation of dying, as he gazes at
Bowker
worn
wife, tells the spectators that in the event of his This turns death, Bowker is not to be prosecuted.
the tide of public feeling strongly in his favor.
Rufe Chadd is reflected by a great majority. The following excerpt shows the educational sta tus of the individual mountaineer and of the com
munity There he (Rufe Chadd) had lived seventeen years in ignorance of the alphabet; he was the first of his name who could write it. From an almost primitive state he had overtaken the civili zation of Ephesus and Colbury, no great achieve ments it might seem to a sophisticated imagina tion; but the mountains were a hundred years
:
"
behind the progress of those centers. 1 Thanks to Miss Murfree s work in this direction, the great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and their inhabitants have been well delineated. She has drawn for the bulk of her work from the moun tains among which she lived. Ôf that locality she is to-day not only the pioneer but also the great
est living interpreter.
i
"In
Page 163
"Electioneerin
on Big Injun
Mounting"
in
the Tennessee Mountains/
CHAPTER
IN
VIII
THE WEST
SINCE Bret Harte first exploited his unique Cali fornia before the admiring East, there has never been any dearth of Western stories. The maga
zines regularly print tales in
which the
ranch,- the
cowboy, the bucking bronco and revolver juggling

are principal features. Even the moving picture houses our latest visitation have featured sce
narios dealing with Western life and adventure. It is, of course, impossible to cover the entire scope of what has been accomplished in this field but
it is feasible to
glance at the
pioneer, Bret Harte, followers.
work of the famous and some of his better known
First of all, I desire to show that there is a constant call for material dealing with Western themes. It may be assumed that numerous writers
are more than ready to gratify this The following extracts are taken from a trade manual 1 for writers and specify the needs
exist
who
want.
of the publications mentioned:

i "1001 Places to Sell 1909. Deposit, N. Y.
Mss.,"
p.
62
The Editor Pub.
Co.,
97
98

"Out
Los Angeles, Cal. Replying to your letter, I would say that the one definite re quirement of this magazine is that the matter shall be Western. This requirement is not met by merely locating the story, for example, in the West, but the Westernness must be vital. "Overland Monthly, The, San Francisco, CaL A magazine of the West; uses stories of pioneer
West,
<
"
life,
adventure, mining.
:
."
Monthly, Lafayette B ld g, Portland, Ore. Fiction Uses love stories if not over senti adventure fiction if of the Western or of mental,
"Pacific
the Pacific, storiettes if. of Western pointedly of any other locality

.
life,
.
or if not
desires
and
in particular clean
and wholesome
fiction of
West
ern
life
and
characters."
"National Magazine, Boston, Mass. Fiction: Likes Western, Southern and other settings, but does not care for New England. 2
Just as the Magna Charta marks an important epoch for the liberties of the English people, so
Bret Harte s ITJ^-JjiicjL appearance/of * (Overland Monthly, 1868) signalize the beginning of the modern American short story that deals with a specific Al locality.
does the
__
though short
e. g.,
"M
stories of this nature

"The
appeared before
Camp,"
the publication of
Liss"
Luck
of Roaring
by Bret Harte himself, nevertheless
iPage Page
63, Ibid. 60, Ibid.
IN
their
THE WEST
merely
local.
its
99 u
success
was
itself
The
Luck"
achieved for
reputation.
and for
author a national
Briefly, it is the story of the regeneration of a mining camp through the birth of a little child.
its
very successful attempt of or of anyone to transcribe the un usual phases of life and scenery in the gold dig
It is notable as the first
author
ging regions into the form of fiction. Its pathos heightened by the setting of primal woods, gulches, torrents and elemental man, fiercely strug gling with his environment. The passions portrayed
is
are
naked and gripping, lacking the restraints of civilization but rudely appealing and powerful. The plot development and the final resolution or
climax depend for their success upon the wild scenic and human environment in which they take their
course.
No
short story since the day of
Hawthorne
had made
skill
so singularly an American appeal; no short story since the day of Poe showed so much
technique. The giant snow-crowned the rude cabins of the pioneer settlers, the Rockies, melee of a refugee society give the .story not only
and
a realistic background but the vmity of impres

sionism rivaling in class though not in kind, the artistry of "The Fall of the House of Usher."
,
The description of the various types of men that were to be found in "Roaring Camp" will illus trate Harte s knowledge of his locality and his
vividness of characterization:
100
The assemblage numbered about a hundred men. One or two of these were actual fugitives from
justice,
less.
some were criminal, and
all
were reck
Physically they exhibited no indication of
their past lives
and
character.
The greatest scamp
had a Raphael
hair
;
face,
with a profusion of blonde
Oakhurst, a gambler, had the melancholy air
Hamlet; the cool and most courageous man was scarcely over five feet in height, with a soft voice and an embar The term roughs applied rassed, timid manner. to them was a distinction rather than a definition. Perhaps in the minor details of fingers, toes, ears,
est
etc.,
and
intellectual abstraction of a
the
camp may have been
deficient,
but these
omissions did not detract from their ag gregate force. The strongest man had but three
slight
fingers
on his right hand; the best shot had but

in this
one
eye."
John Oakhurst, the gambler mentioned

r
description, is the chief character in the companion story of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat." All the
of the story except two are men and of loose morality. All of them had been exiled from the mining town of Poker Flat, when
persons
women
that
town underwent a
violent
moral regenera
tion.
The tragedy is heightened by the presence of un suspected nobility in the dissolute outcasts and the background of mountain scenery looming about them
in awe-inspiring grandeur.
The crux
of the
IN
THE WEST
101
plot is reached through a snowstorm which hedges in the poor victims and subjects them to certain death from starvation.
They look about them, seeking some avenue

escape.
"But
of
it
revealed drift on drift of snow piled
high around the hut, a hopeless, uncharted, track less sea of white lying below the rocky shores to
which the castaways still clung. 1 Thus, with the snow drifting in hopeless masses
all about,
yielding
est
* *
up
they perish, innocent and guilty alike, their lives to nature in one of her cruel-
moods.
Tennessee s Partner/ is worthy to take a place beside these two masterpieces of Western delinea is the very incarnation of tion. "Tennessee"
faithfulness.
So forcefully is his act of final de votion to a dead comrade (a scoundrel) depicted that we are touched to tears. Almost beast-like,
he plods along thinking of nothing but the mem ory of the man he had befriended his partner. One sentence is sufficient to outline -the scenic
setting
:
"And
above
all this,
etched on the dark firma
ment,
remote and passionless, crowned with remoter passionless stars. 2 A very interesting publication that gives an excellent idea of what California has meant to its
rose
the
Sierra
From From
"The
Luck
of
"Tennessee s
Roaring Camp." Partner/ by Bret Harte.
102

is
writers
It
called
"California
Story of the
Files."
was published at the time of the World s Fair celebration and is in the nature of a trumpet blast heralding the greatness of that state and its pre
letters.
eminence in
Making
all
allowances,
it
how
gives
ever, for a little
fond exaggeration,
still
an excellent idea of California

writers.
as it impressed its
It also attempts to define the California
attitude toward them. The feeling against the faithfulness of Bret Harte s portrayals is voiced in
this passage
"But
:
he has remembered things rather strangely, so Calif ornians think. He has a wonderful Bret Harte world of his own that he draws on and
amplifies
and turns and
twists to suit his literary
purpose.
"If he would only come and sojourn here for a year, possibly he might get a series of kodaks to lay away that would give him an entirely new
world to present, much more agreeable, much more faithful than his old supply, which never were
in quite the right focus. l The editor of the Argonaut at that time, Mr. Jerome A. Hart, gives a lengthy list of short-story
writers
who have
life.
dealt
list
with various phases of

is
California
as it
The furnishes some
interesting inasmuch
slight indication of the
way
writers flock to seize
upon
the material most famil
iar to them, to gather inspiration

i "California
from the scenes

Mrs. Ella
Story of the
Files"
Pub. 1893.
Sterling
Cummins.
IN
of their
THE WEST
103
own homes.
list
a similar
ity.
To a greater or less extent, be compiled for any local might
Mr. Hart among others, mentions the following

writers
and the scope of

1
:
their
work
E. H. Clough
Stories distinctively of the coast
ranches pictures of life in mines, on cattle towns. in frontier
and
of
Mrs.
Yda Addis Stork:
Another
phase
Pacific Coast life, the semi-Spanish civilization. Sam Davis: Stories of the life of the frontier.
Frank Bailey Millar d and
Edward Muson:
Stories relating to life on the railroad in the rail road towns and with the Indians.
William S.
posts
Neill:
Life on the frontier

of
the
"
army
cattle
R.
and among L. Ketchum:
the Indians.
Stories
great
ranches of Wyoming, Utah and other Territories and (now states). "His cowboy is the real cowboy
not the fantastic creature of the stage. E. W. Townsend: Pictures of life in San Fran
cisco.
Turning from California we shall note the work of two representative modern writers who have White influenced by the WestÊdward
^Stewart
the"
"been
"ÔTOnfe and O. Henry. From^gtcîes of of the form we can glean some excellent examples
er s work.
(We have
Ibid.
already noted his portraits
of lumbermen.)
Page 204,
104
"The__Girl
dian story
Got tKeTWest
Who
Rattled"
A young
a typical In girl in a journey

is
across the plains breaks
wagons and her absence
away from the train of is noted by one of the

Both
is
guides, Alfred, who spurs to overtake her. of them are sighted by Indians. The girl
told
to kill herself, should the Indians succeed in
dering her companion. He explains to the Indians habitually maltreat their female cap tives and afterwards expose them to a lingering death. In the fight that follows he stands the In
dians off, single handed, through knowing their methods of warfare. An accidental slip of his foot
gives the girl, in her excited state, the impression that all is lost. She kills herself in accordance
mur her how
with his warning. The hero of the story, the guide Alfred, is rep resented as being a little, bashful fellow, but one in whom true courage was not wanting. The girl, Miss Caldwell, and her fiance, Allen, are represented
as typical Easterners whose idea of "roughing is obtained from the comfortable surroundings of the usual camp.
it"
Here
is
a vivid description of
how
the Indians
rally for fight:

"From various directions, silently, warriors on horseback sprang into sight and moved dignifiedly toward the first corner, forming at the last, a band
i "Stories
of
the
Wild
Life"
Edward Stewart White.
McClure, Phillips & Co.
1904.
IN
THE WEST
105
of perhaps thirty men. a moment, and then, one

vals,
They talked together for by one, at regular inter detached themselves and began circling at
full
speed to the left throwing themselves behind
and yelling shrill voiced, but firing no shot as yet/ 1 Their method of warfare is outlined as follows Yet there is one thing that can stop them if skillfully taken advantage of, and that is their lack An Indian will fight hard when of discipline. cornered, or when heated by lively resistance, but he hates to go into it in cold blood. As he nears So the opposing rifle this feeling gets stronger. often a man with nerve enough to hold his fire,
their horses
: 1
fierce charge merely by waiting until within fifty yards or so, and then suddenly Each savage raising the muzzle of his gun. knows that but one will fall, but, cold blooded, he
can break a
it
is
does not
want
to be that one;
it
is
and
for
since in such
disciplined
fighters
each
himself,
he
promptly ducks behind
his
to the right or the left.
mount and circles away The whole band swoops

winged terns on
Alfred,
and divides
,a
like a flock of swift

2
windy day.
X In
another story,
jiiUvJIs
Tenderfoot,
is
the scout, whose bashful, timid manner for lack of grit by people who do not
1
mistaken
know him,
of the
From
Ibid.
"The
Wild
2
Life,"
Girl Who Got Rattled" in by Edward Stewart White.
"Stories
106
gets a commission to take fifty thousand in green backs from Standing Rock to Spotted Tail. At Alfred would Billy s tavern there is a hold-up. have gotten away safely but Billy s life is threat
ened by Black Hank, the bandit chief, because he suspected of haying harbored and protected the messenger. At this point Alfred enters, forces all
is
to put down their arms, empties the revolvers in a wonderful display of shooting and rides off with all
the horses of the bandits.
He
promises to leave
them and the

the
trail.
confiscated firearms at a point along
a source of interest the strange contrasts of a primitive order of society the sound
:
YThis story like matic and uses as
others of
its
class is
melodra
sleep and the sudden death ; the braggart and swagge rer proving a coward; the timid man asserting
himself in the moment of trial as a hero. The play of pistols and the hold-ups are added as scenic
accessories.
Edward Stewart White
s is
the Western story as
tne Easterner likes to read

action, excitement
it,-^
raw, vivid, full of
and the
clicking of guns.
Jiln 0.
tings for
Henry who has

some of
also
his stories
used Western set we meet a writer who
can claim the distinction of being a true cos mopolite. His work reflects his diversified travels.
lifetime spent in living" and not in breathing the steam-heated air of a close office, he traveled in many localities and gained
"
During an eventful
IN
THE WEST
107
He was born inspiration and material from all. at Greensboro, N. C., in 1868, spent two and a half years on a Texas ranch, served as newspaper man,
as
a sojourner for business reasons in Central
America and as a soda water clerk in a drug store. Finally he settled in New York. Here he seems to have drawn his greatest inspiration, as we shall see
in the next chapter.
V"
is a collec His volume, Heart of the West, tion of stories with a setting in the Western States. A great deal of the material is taken from the life of the Mexican border and the big cattle ranches. The characters are cowpunchers and knockabout
agents.
The setting furnishes the main plot motives and contributes to the developing incidents. 0. Henry s own experience on the Western plain gave him a first hand knowledge of the customs that prevail there. The freedom and ease of the life
depicted
may
be contrasted with the narrower but
no
*
less
intensely exciting existence of the

?
New
Yorker.
is a typical story of the gearts_jjid ^Crosses West. It tells of the love of a ranch manager who
married a cattle king s daughter only to find him How the order of pre self second in command. cedence was readjusted is the theme of the story. The principal persons are Webb Yeager, the sub
ordinated husband, Baldy Woods, his adviser, a
cowpuncher, and Santa Yeager, formerly Santa

McAllister,
Queen of the Napolito.
108

of horseback riding are especi
The descriptions
ally sympathetic:
"With
rise of
a pounding rush that sounded like the a covey of quail, the riders sped away to
ward different points of the compass. A hundred yards on his route, Baldy reined in on the top of a bare knoll, and emitted a yell. He swayed on his horse; had he been on foot the earth would have risen and conquered him; but in the saddle he was a master of equilibrium, and laughed at
whisky and despised the center of gravity. * Here is a picture of horseback comrades in Texas
:
Lake, where their routes diverged, they for a parting cigarette. For miles they up had ridden in silence save for the soft drum of
"At
Dry
reined
the ponies hoofs on the matted mesquite grass, and the rattle of the chaparral against their wooden stirrups. But in Texas discourse is sel
dom
continuous.
You may
fill
in a mile, a meal,
and a murder between your paragraphs without detriment to your thesis. So without apology, AVebb offered an addendum to the conversation that had begun ten miles away." 2 His first hand knowledge of cattle conditions is to be gleaned from this Webb is speak passage.
ing:
There
1
a herd of cows and calves/ said he, and

Crosses"
From
Ibid.
"Hearts
in
"The
Heart of the West/
by O. Henry.
2
IN
THE WEST
109
to be
near the Hindo Water-Hole on the Fris that ought moved away from timber. Lobos have killed
of
three
the
calves.
You d
better tell
Simms
forgot to leave to attend to it.

is
orders.
"
night scene on the ranch
briefly
but vividly
sketched, reminding us somewhat of the nocturne in Cable s "Mme. Delphine":

1
famous
midnight Santa slipped softly out of the ranch house, clothed in something dark and plain. She paused for a moment under the live-oak trees.
"At
The
light
prairies were
somewhat dim, and the moon was pale orange, diluted with particles of an
impalpable, flying mist.

tled in every
But
the
mock bird whis
of vantage; leagues of flow ers scented the air and a kindergarten of little
bough
shadowy rabbits leaped and played

near by.
2
in
an open space
Y/What
|the
It is is the Western spirit, we may ask? composite photograph of its men, its animals, The tramp and bellowing of cattle its scenery. the plains of chaparral, the beat of horses hoofs
on soft mesquite grass, the bellowing of cows as they are branded, the yelping of lobos, the tread of men wearing heavily weaponed belts, the dash and verve of women born to action and power, the
picturesque and charming dialect of the half-Mexi cans all these, blended harmoniously and their es sence distilled, might stand for the spirit of the
West.
i
From
"Hearts
and
Crosses."
2 Ibid.
110
In "Jelemachus, Friend" occurs a passage worth quoting as showing the means of livelihood adopted by commercial free lances. Hicks, the hotel pro
prietor, speaks:
I had a friend once of the entitlement of Paisley Fish that I imagined was sealed to me for an endless space of time. Side by side for seven
years we had mined, ranched, sold patent churns, herded sheep, took photographs and other things,
built wire fences
and picked prunes.
"
V The humor of 0. Henry is the genuine kind that makes you smile both inwardly and outwardly. It is like the dashing of cold water on a forehead hot and pulsing with the day s business, ennui or
worries.
And
truth to
human nature
the best part of it all is the absolute that dominates all characters
tions they
no matter in what out-of-the-way or unusual posi may be thrust. In the "Handbook of
Hymen
bound
"
for instance, the inciting cause
is
the fact
that Sanderson Pratt

in
and Idaho Green are snow the mountains for over three weeks. The
is
resulting disgust of one with the other
humorously
What a contrast, as we shall see, to the depicted. brutal realism of Jack London s "In a Far Coun
where two men are placed in a similar situa try tion and are thrown solely on each other s com
"
panionship.
Sanderson Pratt
is telling
Friend,"
how they
in
"The
got there
iFrom
West,"
"Telemaclms,
Heart of the
by 0. Henry.
IN
"We
THE WEST
111
the
was up in the Bitter Root Mountains over Montana line prospecting for gold. A chin-
whiskered
man
in Walla-Walla carrying a line of
and hope as excess baggage, had grubstaked us; there we was in the foothills pecking away, with on hand to last an army through a
enough grub
peace
conference."
The disgust
of the
men with
each other, a feel

:
is thus ing of which Polar explorers have told, indicated in their conversation. Green discourses
"
never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the spheres compared
I
to this attenuated
stream of asphyxiated thought
that emanates out of your organs of conversation. The kind of half-masticated noises that you emit
s cud, only every day puts me in mind of a cow she s lady enough to keep hers to herself, and you
ain
"
"
t.
Mr. Green, says I, you having been a friend of mine once, I have some hesitations in confess for society ing to you that if I had my choice
between you and a common, yellow, three-legged cur pup, one of the inmates of this here cabin
would be wagging a tail just at present. The rest of the story tells how the men find two books and one of them applies the knowledge of a wife. gleaned from his volume to the winning There have been many writers of Western stories, but most of them have taken as their models,
112
whether consciously or unconsciously the big men such as Harte, White and 0. Henry. This does not mean necessarily that the writings of the others
are less originalXbut that the
work of the three
men mentioned
short story be
is
it
fairly typical of the Western tragic, serio-comic or altogether
humorous.
the
It is
find a fresh point of
becoming increasingly difficult to view and for that reason
modern writer s product unless it reflects the West as he himself sees it from his own peculiar angle, will prove disappointing and will sound merely as an echo of what someone else has said
before.
CHAPTER IX
THE PHOTOGRAPHER OF NEW YORK LIFE
:
O.
HENRY
NEW YORK
since
it
can hardly be called a single locality

of so
is
made up
First
vidual sections.
many distinctly we have a well defined
indi
divi
In addition to the more or less prosaic middle class we have the extreme types of the rich and the poor. In addition there
are the various nationalities grouped in their own quarters, malodorous, dingy, odd, perhaps, but al
sion according to wealth.
ways picturesque. Thus New York, not being a homogeneous city seems hardly adapted to being artistically circumscribed by one man. there is a writer who came nearer than ^/And yet anyone else to understanding the New York motif, complex as it is. To his observing senses and sym pathetic heart its sights, sounds and experiences be came blended into a kind of significant composite of wonder/ To him the streets were like the thor oughfares of Bagdad through which the good Caliph
Harouii
al
Always
to
Raschid strolled in search of adventures. him there was something salient, some
thing suggestive, something typical of a great city. He drew freely from its almost inexhaustible stock
113
114

and portrayed them with a faithful them easy to recognize. ^To 0.
the
distinction
of characters
ness that makes
Henry (Sidney Porter) belongs

life.
of having been the photographer of metropolitan
His methods of work were straightforward and

effective.
"When
He
says of himself
I first
came
to
New York
I spent a great I did I
deal of time knocking around the streets. things then I wouldn t think of doing now.
to
used
hours of the day and night along the river fronts, through Hell s Kitchen, down the Bowery, dropping into all^nanner of places, and
walk at
all
who would hold converse with met anyone but what I could learn something from him; he s had some experi ences that I have not had; he sees the world from
talking with anyone
me.
I have never
own view point. If you go at it in the right way, the chances are that you can extract some thing of value from him. But whatever else you do, don t flash a pencil and note book; either he 1 will shut up or he will become a Hall Caine.
his
A
"A
surprises
story attempting to convey a sense of the New York constantly holds out is
Little
The author sup posedly goes out with his friend Rivington to see what the Bowery can offer in the way of
Local
Color."
interesting types.
1
On
the sidewalk in front of
"Whirligigs"
Current Literature, July, 1910. Doubleday, Page
&
Co.
1910.
NEW YORK
LIFE
115
the club where they had dined, they come upon two men engaged in an earnest discussion about
political
economy.
in
his
One of these is very utterances. The author asks

this
is
"
slangy"
Riving-
ton whether
finds,
not
Bowery tough.
He
to his surprise, that the
man
is
professor.
They continue to the Bowery ington meets a policeman whom he knows. The officer points out a young man named Kerry, who, he says, knows the Bowery very well. Rivington
addresses him in
to
a college where Riv-
Bowery argot but is astounded hear the tough answering him in pure English. Rivington is very much taken aback but consoles himself thus
:
Well, anyhow, it couldn t have happened any where but in little old New York.
"
"
The flat dwellers, especially the occupants of cheap furnished rooms are well portrayed in "The Gift jiLth
Jim and Delia plan to give each other a Christ mas present suitable to the estimate in which a very loving married couple hold each other. Each one
parts with the thing most dear to get the present, she with her precious long hair, he with his only She purchases an heirloom, a heavy gold watch.
expensive platinum watch. chain; he a set of tur quoise combs for her lost hair. "Of all who give
and receive
iFrom
gifts,"
writes 0. Henry,
Million"
"such
as they
"The
Four
Doubleday,
Page
&
Co.
116

They are
is
are wisest.
of the poor
the magi. The self-sacrifice here the principal theme.

"
Yorkers will easily recognize an original somewhere corresponding to this description from
the
New
same story
"In
the vestibule below was a letter box into
which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring." That well-known New York institution, the cafe, is well drawn. Note the accurate detail in the fol
lowing invoke your consideration of the scene the marble-topped tables, the range of leather-uphol
:
"I
stered
wall seats,
the
gay company, the

toilets, speaking in
ladies
dressed in demi-state
art; the sedulous
an ex
quisite visible chorus of taste, economy, opulence or
and
largess-loving garcons, the
music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the composers the melange of talk and laughter and, if you will, the Wiirzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips as a ripe cherry sways on its branch to the beak of a robber jay. I was told by a sculptor from Mauch Chunk that the
;
scene was truly Parisian.

"
In Between Rounds" 0. Henry gives us a view of a quarrelsome domestic pair in a repertoire of discord.
The following extract will take us at once into the midst of the war crash:
i
From
"A
Cosmopolite in a
Cafe""
in
"The
Four
Million."
NEW YORK
"
LIFE
117
"Pigs
face"
is it?
said Mrs.
McCaskey and
hurled a stew pan full of bacon and turnips at her

lord.
"Mr. McCaskey was no novice at knew what should follow the entree.
He repartee. On the table
was a roast
rocks.
He
sirloin of pork, garnished with sham retorted with this and drew the ap
propriate return of a bread pudding in an earthen hunk of Swiss cheese accurately thrown dish.
by her husband struck Mrs. McCaskey below one When she replied with a well aimed coffee eye. pot full of a hot, black, semi-fragrant liquid the 1 battle, according to courses, should have ended. For all the humorous treatment of the quarrel, it In is thrown upon the screen sharply and truly.
the
*
same
story,
New York
:
is
characterized half
humorously, half seriously
Silent, grim, colossal, the big city has ever stood against its revilers. They call it hard as iron they say that no pulse of pity beats in its bosom; they compare its streets with lonely forests and deserts
;
of lava.
is
But beneath the hard crust of the lobster found a delectable and luscious food. Perhaps a different simile would have been wiser. Still nobody should take offense. We would call no one
a lobster without good
and
sufficient
claws."
There are a great many men and women who, having no ties of kindred in New York City, live
in furnished rooms.
i
The
desirability of the house,

"The
From
"Between Rounds"
in
Four
Million."
118
the

room and the treatment depends upon the lodg
In
"The
er s purse.
Skylight
Room"
0.
Henry
pictures for us
room"
how
the hunter for a
"furnished
is
shown around:
if you still stood on one foot, oh, then with your hot hand clutching the three moist dollars
Then
and hoarsely proclaimed your hide ous and culpable poverty, never more would Mrs. Parker be cicerone of yours. She would honk
in your pocket,
loudly the word Clara/ she would show you her back and march downstairs. Then Clara, the col ored maid would escort you up the carpeted ladder that served for the fourth flight and show you
the Skylight Room. It occupied seven by eight feet of floor space at the middle of the hall. On each side of it was a dark lumber closet or store room.
was an iron cot, a washstand and a chair. seemed to close in upon you like the sides of a coffin. Your hand crept to your throat you gasped, you looked up as from a well and breathed once more. Through the glass of the little skylight you saw a square of blue infinity. Two dollars, suh, Clara would say in her half"In
it
Its four bare walls
contemptuous, half-Tuskegeenial tones." The type that goes to make up New York s great Bohemia of artist would be s, geniuses, pretenders
and camp followers

of
1
Love."
is
touched upon in
"A
Service
From From
"The
"A
Four
Million."
Love"
Service of
in
"The
Four
Million."
NEW YORK
"Joe
LIFE
119
Larrabee came out of the post-oak flats Middle West pulsing with a genius for pic of the At six he drew a picture of the town torial art.
pump
with a prominent citizen passing
it hastily.
This effort
was framed and hung
in the
window by the side of the ear of even number of rows. At twenty he left for New York with a flowing necktie and a capital tied up somewhat closer.
Caruthers did things in six octaves so tree village in the South, promisingly in a pine that her relatives chipped in enough in her chip hat
"Delia
drug store corn with an un
for her to
go
f
North
but that
and
is
finish.
They could
not see her
our
story."
The story subsequently relates their struggle to char exist but what interests us most here is the
acterization of the pair.
We
get a glimpse of the
source from which the tawdry Bohemias of lower New York are being constantly recruited. Parallel in interest to our Bohemian is the "Man About Town." Who is he, what does he do, what does he look like?
A
a
newspaper reporter in a
"Man
sketch by
"
0.
Henry
called
About
Town"
attempts to frame a definition:
About Town" is a "Rounder" and a "Club something between
Why/
said he,
"Man
man."
He
s
t,
isn t exactly
well,
he
fits
in between
bouts.
Mrs. Fish
receptions and private boxing

well,
He
i
doesn
he doesn
Town"
t
in
belong either to the

"The
From
"A
Man About
Four
Million."
120
vanized Iron Workers
Lotos Club or to the Jerry McGeorghegan Gal Apprentices Left Hook
Chowder
to
Association.
don
exactly
ll
describe
him
to you.
You
see
know how him every
s anything doing. Yes, I suppose he s Dress clothes every evening; knows the ropes calls every policeman and waiter in town by their first names. No; he never travels with the
where there
a type.
;
hydrogen derivatives. You generally see him alone or with another man.
"
One of the best stories I have read by any author, rivaling the choicest work of de Maupassant in forceful presentation, vividness and suggestiveness
is
"An
Unfinished
is
Story."
Here
night.
"The
an impression from
were
filled
it
of the streets at
streets
with the rush hour
floods, of people.
The
calling
electric lights of
Broadway
from from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around to come in and attend the singeing school.
glowing
leagues,
were
moths from miles,
in accurate clothes with faces like those carved on cherry stones by the old salts in sailors homes, turned and stared at Dulcie as she sped unheeding,
Men
past them. Manhattan, the night blooming Cereus, was beginning to unfold its dead white, heavy-
odored petals." 1 In the streets of this dangerous city walk all types of men. Meanest and vilest of all are the
i
From
"An
Unfinished
Story"
in
"The
Four
Million."
NEW YORK
avowed
prey
is
LIFE
121
sensualists
and human
beasts whose usual
the poor shop girl, tired of monotony and crusts, longing for excitement and champagne din man of this kind is Piggy" in the same ners.
"
The following description story. vivid characterization

:
is
a model of
Piggy needs but a word.
When the
girls
named
him, an undeserving stigma was cast upon the noble
family of swine. The words-of-three-letters-lesson in the old blue spelling book begins with Piggy s biography. He was fat; he had the soul
of a rat, the habits of a bat, and the magnanimity He wore expensive clothes and was of a cat.
. . .
a connoisseur in starvation.
He
could look at a
shop girl and tell you to an hour how long it had been since she had eaten anything more nourishing than marshmallows and tea. He hung about the
shopping districts and prowled around in depart ment stores with his invitations to dinner. Men who escort dogs upon the streets at the end of a He is a type; I can string look down upon him. dwell upon him no longer my pen is not the kind
;
intended for him I

;
am no
carpenter.
Of course
Piggy
"As
this particular story ends unhappily. The author s s invitation is at last accepted.
is
comment
put in the form of a dream
I said before, I
dreamed that
was stand
ing near a crowd of prosperous looking angels, and a policeman took me by the wing and asked if I belonged with them.
122
"

Who are they? Why/ said he,
I asked.
11
they are the
men who
hired
working girls and payed em five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch ? Not on your immortality/ said I. I m only the fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum and x murdered a blind man for his pennies.
" "
It is against the code of the story teller s art
preach a moral lesson. More powerful, how ever, than an economic exposition of the dangers of starvation wages and more appealing than the
to
most eloquent sermon is this story of Dulcie, the weak, and Piggy, the beast.
good
bit of observation is
contained in
all
Mam
2
mon and
the
Archer."
We
have
seen a street-
blockade such as
"Richard
is described in the following : stood in the cab and looked around.
He saw a congested flood of wagons, trucks, cabs, vans and street cars filling the vast space where
Broadway, Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth street maiden fills her twenty-two inch girdle. And still from all the cross streets they were hurrying and rattling toward the converging point at full speed, and
cross one another as a twenty-six inch
hurling themselves into the struggling mass, lock ing wheels and adding their drivers imprecations
to
1 2
the clamor.
The
entire traffic
Story."
of
Manhattan
Four Mil
From From
"An
Unfinished
"Mammon
and the
Archer"
in
"The
lion."
NEW YORK
seemed
oldest
to
LIFE
around them.
123
have jammed
itself
The
the thousands of specta tors that lined the sidewalks had not witnessed a
street blockade of the proportions of this one.
New Yorker among
Let us take a look at Coney Island from 0.
Henry s fresh view point. The clamorous amuse ment place is not only perfectly described but the
very soul of
it is
laid bare.
7
"Brickdust
Row
man named
where he
Blinker.
introduces us to a wealthy He goes to Coney Island
sees the masses
pushing and jostling
to
en
joy themselves. At first he is repelled, but then the inner meaning of the sight becomes clear to him.
"He
no longer saw a mass of Vulgarians seek
ing gross joys.
He now
hundred thousand true

were wiped
out.
idealists.
looked clearly upon a Their offenses
Counterfeit and false though the
garish joys of these spangled temples were, he per ceived that deep under the gilt surface they offered saving and apposite balm and satisfaction to the
restless
human heart. Here, at least, was the husk Romance, the empty but shining casque of chiv alry, the breath-catching though safe-guarded dip and flight of adventure, the magic carpet that transports you to the realms of fairyland, though its journey be through but a few poor yards of He no longer saw a rabble but his brothers space. seeking the ideal. There was no magic of poesy
of
here or of art; but the glamour of their imaginai
From
"The
Trimmed
Lamp"
Doubleday, Page
&
Co.
124
tion turned yellow calico into cloth of gold and the megaphones into silver trumpets of joy s heralds."
Voice of the City/ * as its name indicates, attempts to get at the meaning behind the noises
"The
we must take the tre mendous crash of the chords of the day s traffic, the laughter and music of the night, the solemn
".
of the great metropolis : . To arrive at it

.
tones of Dr. Parkhurst, the ragtime, the weeping, the stealthy hum of cab wheels, the shout of the press agent, the tinkle of fountains on the roof gar
dens, the hullabaloo of the strawberry vender
and
the covers of Everybody s Magazine, the whispers of the lovers in the parks all these sounds must into Voice not combined, but mixed, and of go
the mixture an essence made; and of the essence an extract an audible extract, of which one drop 2 shall form the thing we seek. as showing 0. Henry s attitude toward Lastly the big city whose meaning he read so well, I may cite from the opening paragraph of "The Green
Poor."
"In
the big city the twin spirits, Romance and Adventure, are always abroad seeking worthy woo
ers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at us and challenge us in twenty different guises. With1
Page
2
Title story from & Co. 1909.
"The
Voice of the
City."
City"
Doubleday,
From
"The
Voice of the
Million."
"The
Four
NEW YORK
LIFE
125
out knowing why, we look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gal lery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thorough
fare
we hear a cry of agony and fear coming from an empty and shattered house; instead of at our
familiar curb a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for
us and bids us enter a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous
;
hate, affection
and fear with hurrying strangers
in the passing crowds; a sudden souse of rain and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter
of the Full
Moon and
first
cousin of the Sidereal
System ; at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon, eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the mysterious, the perilous changing
clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow
them.
We
are
grown
stiff
with the ramrod of
convention
down our backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull
life,
romance has been a pallid of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept thing in a safe deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud
to reflect that our
with a steam radiator.

that reveal 0.
There are numerous other

s
stories
and sketches
Henry remarkable knowledge of the great metropolis and its human types. I have
i
From
"The
Green
Door"
in
"The
Four
Million."
126
tried as far as possible in this chapter to reveal him to the reader at first hand, and not secon
darily through criticism. The plots of his stories need not particularly be emphasized. They represent skillful workman
is true, but technique, as such, is outside the province of our discussion. They are almost all cleverly conceived and because the surprise
ship, it
is so prominent, the incidents situations are frequently bizarre, unusual and very often strained. In a weaker writer this would
element in them
and
yield a nonsensical hash
in a writer gifted merely with a pretty fantasy it would entertain but never convince. In the stories of 0. Henry, however,
;
the characters are so intensely human, their mo and above all, the setting is so realistic that we are whirled along in the
tives so plausible
sweep
is
of the
tale,
fascinated and convinced.
It
that he pictures, a be woefully prosaic or imbued with an atmosphere of the wildest romance. Coney Island, the cheap eating house, the furnished
life,
New York, pulsing New York that can
with
room,
one-
the tenement
flat,
the cafe illuminated with

the sidewalks of
their stories.
"
thousand candle
way,all
power,"
Broad
yield
him
Artists, philis-
and men-about-town form a delightful stock company for the enact ment of brief comedies and tragedies arising from the problems of their occupation and posi tion in society. The magician s wand has touched
tines, hoboes, cabbies, shopgirls
NEW YORK
them
all,
LIFE
127
for they are their natural selves and themselves with a freedom and vivacity disport usually not seen in private individuals appearing in important roles before a critical audience.
kO. Henry as ^Tew York
from all others who have taken a setting in the respect that he possessed a far broader range of vision than any one of them. He is not content to single out one neighborhood and exhaust all its fictional possi In the great hocus-pocus of the city he bilities.
differs
saw unity. Types, sounds, sights, adventures all coalesced and from the blend came that remarkable
product
0.
the 0.
Henry
story.
It is too early to predict his place in literature.
Henry is almost too vital for any dusty place on the shelf of classics. But if ever keen obser vation and a fresh view point, as well as vigorous, if sometimes unorthodox, diction, appeal strongly
to posterity, 0.
Henry
will not suffer oblivion.
CHAPTER X
NEW YORK FROM MANY
ANGLES
THE sense of wonder and the sense of mystery are forever stirred by great polyglot New York. On all sides one hears baffling sounds in unfamiliar
Away from his native Russia, the im migrant Jew (on the lower East Side) reconstructs a replica of his former quarters. The Chinaman
languages.
worships in his own Joss House and indulges his weird, dramatic and musical tastes in his own play house. The Greek seeks his brother in the Ice Cream Parlor or in the Florist Shop. The German
has his imitation Rathskellers on Broadway; the
Frenchman
streets;
his table-d hote restaurants on side the Italian his spaghetti haunts in the heart of his quarter. All indulge in their native
pastimes and ceremonials and yet dimly recognize an allegiance to the government that has turned most of them from subjects into citizens. All have
newspapers in their own language, retailing the latest happenings in the lands they had left and instructing them in their duties toward the land
of their adoption.
colors,
But
is,
like the
all,
spectrum of many
0.
New York
after
a unit.
Henry
128
NEW YORK FROM MANY ANGLES
129
gaze saw the white harmony. In this chapter I shall sketch a few writers who have specialized on
the individual tints.
^-The delineation of school life on the lower East Side has been a unique contribution of Myra Kelly When her first vol to the fiction of New York. was issued the public smiled Little Citizens, ume,
*
broadly at the queer sayings and doings of the little Jewish lads and lassies so grotesquely portrayed. The first story, "A Little Matter of Real Es
tate"
treats of the
humors of school
life.
It
il
lustrates a tangle in the lives of
two school children, who quarrel because the fathers are on cousins, bad terms with each other over a real estate deal.
The
children,
Eva and Sadie Gonorowsky annoy

all
each other in
sorts
of
ways and Teacher
is
Fi distracted at her inability to stop the quarrel. it settles itself. great fire breaks out in nally
Nathan Gonorowsky
of
store.
He
gets a big
sum
money
as insurance
debt to his brother.
and settles his outstanding The two little girls get "glad
on each other.
The setting is a school on the lower East Side devoted to the Americanization of Jewish children. They are represented as talking a mixture of Yiddishized English, which, although very funny, is hardly true to life. It is interesting, however,
when judged as the impression the locality made on an outsider. It is not in our province to criti cise the individual bias of an author toward any
130
THE AMEEICAN SHORT STORY
given locality, but merely to establish the fact of influence. No two original artists can see a scene, a situation or a story in exactly the same way. This must be taken into account whenever
its
it
appears that the writer
point of view differs
from our own conception of the truth. To give some notion of the peculiar Myra Kelly dialect a concoction for which the children are
only partly responsible, we shall listen to Sadie telling us the cause of the trouble
:
Mine uncle he come out of Russia. From long he come when I was a little bit of baby. Und he didn t to have no money for buy a house. So my papa he s awful kind he gives him thousen dollars so he could to buy. Und say, Teacher, what you think? he don t pays it back. It ain t polite you takes thousen dollars und don t
Well.
back So my papa he writes a letter on my uncle how he could to pay that thousen dollars. Goes months. Comes no thousen dollars. So my papa he goes on the lawyer und the lawyer he writes on my uncle a letter how he should to pay. Goes 1 months. Comes no thousen dollars.
pays
it
"
As a contrast to the foregoing we have another story in which the author sees the pathos of her little school world. It is the story of the gift that
Phillips
iFrom &
"Little
Citizens,"
by
Myra
Kelly
McClure,
Co.
1904.
131
the much loved but very poor Morris Mogilewsky gave to his teacher at Christmas time. The passage recounting the presents given by the children is very true to life. Their uselessness, their miscellaneous nature and the fever with
which they are bestowed are equally great "Nathan Horowitz presented a small cup and saucer; Isadore Appelbaum bestowed a large cal endar for the year before last; Sadie Gonorowsky
:
brought a basket containing a bottle of perfume, a thimble and a bright silk handkerchief; Sara
Schrodsky offered a penwiper and a yellow cel and Eva Kidansky gave an elaborate nasal douche, under the pleasing delu sion that it was an atomizer. x But the contribution of Morris was one that his mother had kissed when his father had handed it to her. He was sure that it must be a very ap propriate "present for ladies." It turned out to be the receipt for a month s rent for a room on the top floor of a Monroe street tenement. /Her depiction of school officials whose heads are inflated with a sense of petty power is brutally humorous. Through a peculiar psychologic process
luloid collar button
the school
official
pous, narrow individual.
very often develops into a pom It may be the constant
contact with those
who must bow

it
before his will
or lose their positions;

i
may
be the influence
Lady."
From
"A
Christmas Present for a
132
his official attention.
of a thousand petty details to which he must give Whatever the cause, his soul
the milk of
frequently shrinks until all the humanity and all human kindness have been wrung out
it.
of
This particular type of school official is por trayed by Myra Kelly in the person of an Asso
Superintendent of Schools, known affection Gum Shoe Tim," due by his teachers as to his stealth in ferreting out a teacher s shortcom
ciate
ately
ings.
On
licenses
his approval or disapproval, teachers were renewed or canceled. His methods,

:
in this instance, are especially brutal "He had almost finished his examinations at the
nearest school where, during a brisk campaign of eight days, he had caused five dismissals, nine cases
of nervous exhaustion, and an epidemic of hys
teria."
Myra Kelly
orable
Tim"
*
in the story,
"Morris
nnd
t.hp
Hpn,-^
gives a vivid delineation of this opin
ionated and power-bloated official. \.n the narrow confines of her chosen field she
has worked sincerely. caution that it is a
But
I leave
her with the

are
Myra Kelly world we
reading about and not, strictly speaking, the school world of the lower East Side. The self-sacrifice,
the nobility, the ambition shining out through the fogs of poverty and despair she has not touched
i
From
"Morris
and the Honorable
Tim"
in
"Little
Citi
zens."
133
upon. With the gift of a rich sense of humor she has dwelt upon the foibles of language and of manner that have differentiated the Jewish type
from all others in this country. Her work is all At times she la too frequently broad burlesque. bors too consciously for contrasts, but, all in all,
her stories show a fair knowledge of conditions in her school environment and marked ability to
interpret artistically
its
bizarre picturesqueness.
has depicted his people half as convincingly in their new environment here as Zangwill has in the old. We have had numerous
short story writers who have dealt with this class All too many of them were led of our citizens.
No American Jew
astray by the grotesque elements.

tionalized
as v s
of
Jew who
is
cringes,
The conven who pronounces his w s

is
and whose ruling passion
the accumulation
a figure that recurs again and again in their work.
money
**T)ne of the minor writers
attempt
to see the
Jew
clearly
who has made an honest is Bruno Lessing.
He is a Jew himself and came to his task with an adequate knowledge of the subject and with a The collection certain degree of natural sympathy.
of stories called
"Children
of
Men"
is
fairly rep
resentative of the best he could do.
The opening story

of the
Task,"
is,
in
of this volume, "The my opinion, the best.
End
Its
i "Children
of
Men"
Bruno Lessing.
McClure, Phillips
&
Co.

tragic import
is
driven
description workers.
of
conditions
home through the faithful among the sweatshop
Braun and Lizschen, lovers, are both toilers in the same sweatshop. The girl has consumption. One day he takes her to a free exhibition of paint
ings
"up-town."
foreign timidity incite a
them
out.
fancy has
Their ragged appearance and museum guard to order but not before Lizschen s They go, been caught by a Corot landscape.
When,
shortly after, she becomes very ill, she raves about this picture. Braun decides to steal it for her if possible. His attempt is fortunately suc
is made happy but does not re her death he returns the picture to Upon the exhibitors but is arrested when he fails to ex
cessful.
Lizschen
cover.
plain
how it came into his Braun is represented

whose
possession. as a hard
letariat
finer feelings
worked pro have been kept alive
by his love for Lizschen in spite of the dulling monotony and noise of the shop. The girl, Liz
schen, is a pale, sickly flower the close air of the shop.
who
wilts
away
in
The constant din of the machinery

scribed
:
is
thus de
"The
sewing machines whirred
like a
thousand
what a noise thirty sew machines will make when they are running at ing full speed. Each machine is made up of dozens of little wheels and cogs and levers and ratchets,
devils.
You have no
idea
135
and each part tries to pound, scrape, squeak and bang and roar louder than all the others. The
old
man who went
same shop used
to sit in the cell
crazy last year in this very where they chained
him, with his fingers in his ears, to keep out the He said the incessant noise of the sewing machines. din was eating into his brains, and time and again,
he tried to dash out those poor brains against a
padded wall." The foregoing paragraph
is
an example of sub
the details it jective description that interprets feruno Lessing saw the tragic phases describes,
of the neighborhood clearly. The Roumanians and the Hungarians, as distinct
from the Russian Lithuanians, are

All over the East Side one
cellars
"high
livers."
may
observe their wine
and restaurants.
Cloud"
Rift in the
In one of his stories, "A Lessing gives us a good picture
of the cafe devotee.
He is a Hungarian drunkard, Polatschek, and seems to take an odd delight in music. One night while guzzling freely he hears the restaurant or chestra playing the Rakoczy March. A listener
comments on how beautifully it was played. Po latschek denies this and seizing the leader s violin plays the march with great dash and fervor. Here is a glimpse of him in the cafe interior in Natze s Cafe, "Night after night he would sit where the Gypsies play on Thursdays, drinking
:
From
"The
End
of the
Task."
136

which
is the last He would drink, stage. and never a word to a soul. On music nights he would drink more than usual and his eyes would fill with tears. We all used to think they were maudlin tears, but we had grown accustomed to Polatschek and his strange habits and nobody paid attention to him." 1
sliyovitz
drink, drink,
A
its
suggestive
little
story
"Unconverted"
takes
theme from the numerous attempts constantly made to convert Jews to Christianity. The Rever end Dr. Gillespie opens a "Mission to the East Side
Jews." During his first open air meeting he is struck with a stone on the cheek but is saved from further injury by the intervention of a tall
young
man.
The
latter scatters the
blood upon the Reverend s to his rooms on the top floor of an East Side tenement. An old man in the last stages of a wasting illness is lying on a couch.
crowd, stanches the cheek and invites him
up
The young man tells the Reverend the old man s story a story of self-sacrifice under wrong and true nobility of character. This, he points out, is a real Jew. Those who struck the Reverend
Gillespie are renegades to Judaism.
He
ends up
fervently
"
Would you
Ah, you
"A
convert him?
What would you

his
like
have him believe?

faith?
i
To what would you change
will say there are not

Cloud"
many
Men."
From
Rift in the
in
"Children
of

him.
"
137
No! would
to
God
there were!
It
would
be a happier world.
But it was faith in Judaism that made him what he was. If I if all Jews could only believe
in the religion of their fathers as he believed
l what an example to mankind Israel would be The story ends with this significant paragraph: "The second outdoor meeting of the Reverend s mission to the East Side Jews has Gillespie
!
neve* taken
place."
is a Jew himself, has been able to seize upon and reproduce the unique humor of the Jew. Centuries of persecution have not banished the smile from the Jew s lips. Some
^Bruno
Lessing, because he
times he
is
humorist.
ful.
a conscious, sometimes an unconscious In both instances he is equally delight
Swallow-Tailer for Two" is the story of a singular predicament in which Isidore and Moritz t"A were placed because they endeavored to share a dress suit between them during one evening. Mor
itz promised to give up the suit to Isidore at eleven o clock for two hours wear. In the mean
time Isidore trails after him to see that the suit should be in perfect condition for him. This is
humorously related by Moritz in Yiddish-English

dialect
"
Efry time
looked around
me
seen his
From
"Unconverted."
138

a lookout on der swallow tail evening Such big eyes Isidore had that night!
eyes keepin
dress.
"Don t
vatch
me
like dot,
Izzy,"
I said.
"Dey
ink you are a detectif, unt dot I stole somet ing." Efry time I drops a leetle tiny bit from a cigar ashes on my swallow tail shirt Izzy comes
vill t
running up mit a handkerchief und cleans it off. Efry time I sits down on a chair Izzy comes up unt vispers in my ear, "Moritz, please don t get wrinkles in der swallow tail. Remember I got to wear it next. Efry time I took a drink Moritz comes unt holds der handkerchief under der glass so dot der beer should not drop on der swallow
tail shirt.
"Izzy,"
I says to him,
"I
am
aston
ished.
"
"
The upshot
to be friends.
of
it all is
But
is
that Moritz and Izzy cease the telling of the story rather
than the plot
a noteworthy feature.
Moritz
humor under
stress is especially characteristic of
Jewish nature a shrug of the shoulders and a joke told at one s own expense.
One
of his
of the best stories in the volume

Orbit."
is
JOut
tells"
Bruno Lessing
in this skit
of the dire consequences to the individual
Jew
if
he suddenly changes the habits of a lifetime and becomes a drinker.
Mr. Rosenstein, angered by his wife s insistence on obtaining new red wall paper, announces his intention to begin drinking as a means of punish ing her. Here is where his troubles begin. Four
139
Benedictines gulped down at once change this se date and stationary sphere for Rosenstein. The consequences of his vagary, he finds, are pleasant
to all others
series of
He
but frightful to himself. startling mishaps has taken place. finds that in the artificial exuberance induced
by the spirits, he had dismissed his store staff for a week s holiday, had purchased a white horse to prepare for the opening of a new milk store and among other things had engaged a whole staff of painters to repaper not only the one room his wife
desired but the entire suite.
His wife
is
overjoyed
and Mr. Rosenstein has not the courage

the secret of his generosity. He vently never to take another drink.
to explain promises her fer
This
*
is
the helpless
way
in which Rosenstein or
dered a drink:
*
"
Give me a drink, demanded Rosenstein. What kind of a drink do you want?

looked
bewildered.
asked
not
the bartender.
"Rosenstein
He
did
know one drink from another. He looked at the row of bottles behind the counter, and then his face
lit
*
up.
That bottle over there the big black one. was Benedictine. The bartender poured some of it into a tiny liqueur glass, but Rosenstein
"It
frowned.
"
want a drink,
I said, not a drop.
Fill
me
a big glass.
140

this point Rosenstein s life
liveliness
At
became one
of
picturesque *În the stories I have mentioned, Bruno Lessing has caught the double nature of Jewish life, its
and sharp
climaxes.
tragedy on the one hand and In such tales as "The other.
its
humor on
of the
the
End
of
Task"
we
feel the
utter hopelessness
the sweatshop
worker s fate. He is in a worse plight than Hamlin Garland s farmer. The latter at least has the advantage of language. The soil he tills, although it yields him but a bare living, belongs to him. But for the worker on the machine there is no He pedals away until the consolation, no respite. Boss of Bosses summons him. His life is a round of working and sleeping. The din of the machines
and the smell
of the shop are ever with him. Besides these serious aspects Bruno Lessing has handled with relish the humors of Jewish life and
Jewish character. Sometimes as in the American ization of Shadrach Cohen" the fun has an un
dercurrent of seriousness.
the children that the
The father proves to command, Honor thy father
and thy mother," applies to the relations between them and him. He outwits them and makes them appear mere tyros in the world of business. In Swallow-Tailer for Two," Bruno stories like
"A
Lessing
view.
treatment
theless true to
is broad burlesque but never Jewish mannerisms and points of
Altogether, although his
work
falls short of sub-

limity in treatment
141
in
and although nowhere, even
his greatest climaxes, does he combine the feeling of reality with a sense of dramatic fitness, never
theless his stories are
drawn from
life
and are
worth reading as a Jew s impressions of Jews, ^ferief mention must here be made of a new
tendency in fiction. Specialization has gone so far that not only does an author outline a restricted territory for himself on the basis of nationality but even a single occupation within that nation
ality
is
made
the source of a series of stories.

"Potash
Montague Glass in
and
Perlmutter"
gives
us an entertaining account of the relations between two partners, Abe and Morris, who are cloak and
suit manufacturers.
All the plots in the book are

field.
drawn from that limited
The book
is
humor
ous after a fashion, has some good bits of character ization and touches of commercial philosophy in dialect, but it hardly strikes a high level in the
delineation of the Jew.
It is
mentioned here as
as
reflecting a tendency to further specialization.
Nobody
style he,
tion.
sees
the reporter.
New York so comprehensively What he misses in the niceties
of
more than makes up in scope of observa training Richard Harding Davis re ceived as a reporter on metropolitan papers had tended to sweep him into many places of interest and had made him feel instinctively what was worth
"The
i "Potash
and Perlmutter/
by Montague Glass
Henry
Alteraus Co.,
Pub
s.
142
In the short-story field he has touched upon many phases and has drawn his settings from numerous quarters. There is one field, however, in which he is well-nigh inimitable and that is in
recording.
the delineation of the

creation,
New York
club-man.
His
yet a
Van Bibber, an apparent man living according to a set

set
is
dawdler, and code of honor
manner prescribed by his peers an interesting character. He is not merely a type because Davis was artist enough to give him an individuality of his own but he is
in society,
sufficiently characteristic
to
and in the
be indicative of the
life.
New York
"Her
club-man
attitude toward
First Appearance" 1 is a story in which the darker side of the stage is touched upon. Van
Bibber notes a pretty little child making her debut in a production of the Lester Comic Opera Co.
he hears her mother s name that who had disowned her is a wealthy club-man of his own set. great difficulty he works upon the father s mind sufficiently to arouse
the father
"With
He knows when
man s paternal instincts. The father finally acknowledges her. Van Bibber is impelled to do what he does by the
the
thought that the life of the stage sooner or later contaminates the moral sense. The story is full of references to doings behind the scenes which
i"Van
Bibber and
Others,"
by R. H. Davis
Harper
&
Bros.
1892.

make one
feel that
143
Davis had gathered material

is
for this story at first hand.
just being staged and Bibber, taking advantage of the license ac corded him as an old college chum of Lester s, is
The new production
Van
wandering about behind the scenes "For a moment he hesitated in the crosslights
:
and confusion about him,

their
failing to recognize in
new costumes
his old acquaintances of the
company; but he saw Kripps, the stage manager, perspiring and in his shirt sleeves as always, wildly
waving an arm to someone in the flies, beckoning with the other to the gas man in the front entrance. The stage hands were striking the scene for the
first act,
and fighting with the set for the second, and dragging out a canvas floor of tessellated marble, and a practical pair of steps over it, and
aiming the high quaking walls of a palace and abuse at whoever came in their way. x
to the
is the obdurate father. He belongs type of impassive club-man, who retains his good breeding though violently angry. Even in their lapses from convention it is evident that both he and Van Bibber know the correct form of pro cedure under the circumstances.
Carruthers
For instance, when Van Bibber tells the reason for his errand to Carruthers, the latter, although
iFrom
Others."
"Her
First
Appearance"
in
"Van
Bibber
and
144
deeply hurt, neither scolds nor storms. In a man ner chillingly polite he wounds Van Bibber by pointing out to him that his intrusion into another man s affairs is the act either of a cad or a fool. Note the calmness of Carruthers utterance: Mr. Van Bibber, he began, you are a very
"
brave young man.
You have dared
to say to
me
what those who are my best friends what even my own family would not dare to say. They are afraid it might hurt me, I suppose. They have some absurd regard for my feelings; they hesitate to touch upon a subject which in no way con cerns them, and which they know must be very painful to me. But you have the courage of your convictions; you have no compunctions about tear
ing open old wounds.
"
The habitual
In
restraint of the well-bred
man
is
here evident even

"Eleanore
when
his anger
is
at blood heat.
get a study of a settlement worker. The big settlements situated in the poor districts of the city draw many of their
Cuyler"
we
workers from the ranks of the

ler is
rich.
Eleanore Cuy
a wealthy young girl who undertakes work in a Rivington Street Settlement after dismissing young Wainwright who intended to propose to her.
thrilling experience
is
related in which
Van
insult
Bibber whips three toughs and saves her from and perhaps injury. Wainwright, on coming back to New York, gets wind of the story, goes down
i
From
"Her
First
Appearance."
145
town, finds his Eleanore in a weary, discouraged mood, due to the numerous difficulties encountered
in her work, proposes to her
and
is
The
lined
"Settlement
Worker
"
type
is
accepted. here well out
She comes from a Cuyler. no conception of the problems wealthy home, has
in
Eleanore
that are to confront her

of settlement
and
seeks to enter the field

spirit
work in the
of pursuing a
philanthropic fad.
Her discouragement just before the coming of Wainwright is thus described "She had grown sceptical as to working girls and of the good she did them or anyone else. It was all terribly dreary and forlorn and she wished she could end it by putting her head on some broad shoulder and by being told that it did not matter, and that she was not to blame if the world would be wicked and its people unrepentant and ungrateful. Corrigan, on the third floor, was drunk again and promised trouble. 1 The incident of the fight with the toughs is somewhat strained. The strength of the story and of Davis s work in general, lies in his acute re:
He shows realities to the portorial observation. reader. He reconstructs the environment of a lux
urious
street in the early
an East Side morning hours "From the light of the lamps he could see signs in Hebrew and the double eagle of Russia painted
as easily as he does
:
home
From
"Eleanore Cuyler."
146
on the windows of the saloons. Long rows of trucks and drays stood ranged along the pavements for the night, and on some of the stoops and fireescapes of the tenements a few dwarfish specimens
of the Polish
Jew
sat squabbling in their native
tongue.
different atmosphere is suggested
by the open
ing paragraph: "Miss Eleanore Cuyler had dined alone with her mother that night, and she was now sitting in the
drawing-room near the open fire, with her gloves and fan on the divan beside her, for she was going
out later to a dance.
"She was reading a somewhat weighty German review and the contrast which the smartness of her gown presented to the seriousness of her oc
cupation made her smile slightly as she paused for a moment to cut the leaves. 2
The valet, as a most necessary adjunct to the comfortable existence of the club-man, is the theme of a little story called "Van Bibber s Man Serv
ant."
A valet in the employ of Van Bibber is ambitious

to feel the joys of being in his
master
place
at
Delmonico
if
only once.
dinner, ordered by
Bibber, suddenly has to be called off. Walters, the valet, does not cancel it as he is told to do, passes himself off as one of the guests, eats the
1
Van
From
"Eleanore Cuyler."
2 Ibid.

is just enjoying his mint julep in the cafe when Van Bibber comes in. cigar
147
dinner and
and a
The
life
spirit of the contented, torpidly self-satisfied of the restaurants is reflected in this short
the delight in good dinners, good wines and good cigars which the New Yorker, who dines out, enjoys so much
story
:
was just the sort of dinner he would have ordered had he ordered it for himself at someone else s expense. He suggested Little Neck clams first, with Chablis, and pea soup and caviare on toast, before the oyster crabs, with Johannisberger Cabinet; then an entree of calves brains and rice; then no roast but a bird, cold as paragus with French dressing. Camembert cheese and Turkish coffee. As there were to be no women he omitted the sweets and added three other wines to follow the white wine. It struck him as a par ticularly well-chosen dinner, and the longer he sat and thought about it the more he wished to test its excellence. And then the people all around him were so bright and happy, and seemed to be en joying what they had ordered with such a refine ment of zest that he felt he would give a great deal could he just sit there as one of them for a brief hour/ 71 In order to write this an author must have felt
".
It
the spirit of restaurant gayety. It is not enough merely to have read of it in books. The minute
i
From
"Van
Bibber
Man
Servant."
148

first
touches here and there indicate

ity with the subject
hand familiar
the ordering of the dinner,

detail is laboriously gathered
life.
for instance.
Such
as the result of a full

less opportunities to
New York
who want
offers
count
people
their hours
to pass swiftly
New York
many
gayly. vast a subject that there are other authors who have seen it from still
is so
and
other peculiar angles all their own. rStephen Crane and Owen Kildare were familiar with its dregs; Robert W. Chambers with the decadents of its mon
eyed class Edwin Lef evre with

;
its Wall Street gam no wonder that there should be so many writers who take New York for a setting. It is an inexhaustible wonderbox of the quaint, the bizarre, the comic, the tragic, the dramatic, the maudlin and the pathetic. Its four million souls work out their
blers.
It is
destinies in filthy rookeries, in marble palaces, in
skyscrapers. Every human passion plays itself out. So that there is an endless variety of subject
matter for the writer of the impressionable spirit

an,d the vivid pen.
\S Thus it happens that the big city has its own
fas
cination for literary folk, as much as the sea or the plain or the forest. For night and day upon its pavements there beats the tread of feet. Night
and day within the walls
of its buildings, hopes
are born afresh and despair claims the weak. So many millions of ganglionic cells plot and toil within it that the eternal quiet which falls daily
149
upon thousands of men never calls a halt to the day s work. The tireless, nervous machine throbs away at its labors like a huge piston on an ocean liner. Truly New York is wonderful and its his torians in fiction are like so many Ali Babas know ing a myriad Open-Sesames to a myriad treasure
troves of
human
interest.
CHAPTER XI
A GLIMPSE AT THE FROZEN NORTH ALASKA
:
No more
fearful setting for
human
action exists
than the bare stretches of ice and snow in the far North. Under its dark sky of a six months night
wan sky of a six months day the most gruesome tragedies can be imagined. It is not a land to thaw out the genial nature in man. It makes him shrink into the warmth of his furs
and
its
snow hut, selfishly glad to be alive. Selfpreservation consequently forms a dominating mo

his
tive
and
and about this theme very many tales dealing with the northland may be grouped.
may get an adequate idea of the general scope of this type of short story by reading the col lection contained in Jack London s volume, "The
Son of the Wolf/ 1 The first story, "The White Silence" is a tragedy in which a man known as Malemute Kid is forced
to shoot his life-long comrade, Mason, because the latter had been irretrievably injured by a falling
We
pine.
i"The
The
situation
is
exceedingly tense and draGrosset
ers
Son of the Jack London.
Wolf":
&
Dunlap, Publish
150
A GLIMPSE AT THE FROZEN NORTH
151
matic because the nearest civilized spot was then at least two-hundred miles away over a snow trail
must be traversed with the help of is a starving dogs. Mason s wife, Ruth,
that
vicious,
faithful
Indian
woman who
meets the tragedy with the
stoicism characteristic of her race. The agonizing silence of the great
snow wastes
broods over the tragedy. Both man and dog have become elemental brutes and the struggle between them for mastery is the old one of the beast against
his
We
shrewder captor. from the get a glimpse of the setting

:
fol
lowing
of the
"The
White
afternoon wore on and with the awe, born Silence, the voiceless travelers bent to
their work.
Nature has many tricks wherewith she
of his finity, the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the but earthquake, the long roll of heaven s artillery, the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all,
convinces
man
is
ment
brass
the passive phase of the White Silence. All move heavens are as ceases, the sky clears, the
;
the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own Sole speck of life journeying across the voice. he trembles at his ghostly wastes of a dead world, realizes that his is a maggot s life, noth
audacity,
ing more. Strange thoughts arise, unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance. And the fear of death, of God, of the universe,
152

the hope of the resurrection
conies over him,
and
the
life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essences-it is then, if 1 ever, man walks alone with God.
This
is
ten by a
certainly an impressive description, writ man who had evidently experienced the
feel all the
awesomeness of the White Terror. In the story we dread that a sudden death in the Arctic can inspire.
The
title story,
"The
Son of the
Wolf,"
deals
with the old battle of brain against brawn, of the barbarian against the European, of civilization
against the primitive. One white man withstands a hostile tribe of Indians. Scruff Mackenzie de
win Zarinska, daughter of Thling Tinneh, Chief of the Sticks. As in the previous story the theme is the revelation of elemental strength in the son of the dominant race battling for the possession
sires to
of a
woman.
Shaman, the medicine man of the
Sticks, for reasons of his own antagonistic to Mac kenzie instigates a wild dance by women of the
tribe
was a weird scene, an anachronism. To the South the nineteenth century was reeling off the few years of its last decade; here flourished man
"It
primeval, a shade removed from the prehistoric cave dweller, a forgotten fragment of the Elder
World.
i
The tawny wolf-dogs

"The
sat
between their
Wolf."
From
White
Silence"
in
"The
Son of the
153
skin-clad masters or fought for room, the firelight cast backward from their red eyes or slavered fangs.
The woods, in ghostly shroud slept on unheeding. The White Silence, for the moment driven to the rimming forest, seemed ever crushing inward; the stars danced with great leaps, as is their wont in
the time of the Great Cold; while the Spirits of
the Pole trailed their robes of glory athwart the heavens. J
In a land where man constantly faces the grim aspects of nature, where death by cold, by starva tion and by attacks from hostile tribes is not un
life
common, men lose the surface polish of civilized and reveal their elemental virtues or their ele
Things are reduced to a fear
mental weaknesses.
ful simplicity, for the subterfuges of our conven tional city life do not obtain in a wilderness of
snow and
it.
sky.
A man must mean a
thing
when he
do his part of the community says work with sheer faithfulness. Explanations, ex In a state of cuses, apologies are not wanted.
society where it is necessary to counteract so de termined an opposition on the part of nature to the comfort of man, the work of the individual, if left undone, leaves a gap through which the
He must
forces of destruction
may
enter.
The
justice of
the wilderness
therefore not a thing of legal and oratory. It is dealt out directly in quibbles
is
i
From
"The
Son
of the
Wolf."
154

Death
is
primitive fashion.
the punishment for
most
offenses,
death to the
man whose
life
mars
the happiness or welfare of his brethren. Another element that enters into the life of the
is Chance. A man undertake an enterprise if there is a fighting chance for its success. He will face grave danger
dweller in the Arctic wastes
will
if
there is a possibility of escaping unharmed. But where the odds are completely against him
he will quickly withdraw,
and the re deeming chance receive apt treatment in London s Bettles and Lon Mc"The Men of Forty Mile."
Faiie get into a quarrel about the existence of "chain-ice" and after exchanging blows decide to
Both the
if possible. justice of the wilderness
have a duel with

the combat.
pistols.
Malemute Kid and the sympathy with

afford the loss of either
rest of their friends are out of all
They cannot
so they give the combatants the following hopeless alternative: the man that escapes being killed by bullets will be hanged. Since there is
man,
no percentage whatever of safety in such a combat, Lon McFane withdraws from it. He makes up his mind that to fight means to give up life what ever happens, even to relinquish the slight chance which favored him in many hazardous ventures
of the past. It s a gloryus game- yer running Kid/ cried Lon McFane. All the percentage to the house The and niver a bit to the man that s buckin
"

Devil himself d niver tackle such a cinch
155
and
damned if I do." 71 The point of view of both men

in the following passage
".
is
clearly denoted
time,
Both men had led forlorn hopes in their with a curse or a jest on their tongues, and in their souls an unswerving faith in the God of Chance. But that merciful deity had been shut out from the present deal. They studied the face of Malemute Kid but they studied as one
.
.
led,
As the quiet minutes passed, a feeling that speech was incumbent on them began At last the howl of a wolf-dog cracked to grow.
might the Sphinx.
the silence from the direction of Forty Mile. The weird sound swelled with all the pathos of a break
//One
"ume
ing heart, then died away in a long-drawn sob." of the most characteristic stories of the volin showing the influence of the North
upon the
conventional civilized
Its realism is brutal.
man
is
"In
a Far Country.
There
is
gestion.
Every
detail is pictured in the
no attempt at sug morbid life

in a dreary spot
history of two
men
left alone
to shift for themselves.
Carter Weatherbee and Percy Cuthfert, the former a clerk and the latter a club-man, join an expedition to the Klondike gold fields. They soon become undesirables to the rest of the party on
account of their general tendency to shirk and to When the party decides to advance act selfishly.
i
From
"The
Men
of
Forty
Mile."
156

last stop at the
during the winter from their
Porcu
pine River, these two men, appalled at the pros pect of hardships in traveling determine to remain
at the cabin.
the
The lonesomeness of the North and monotony of their mutual companionship, lead
to petty quarrels, to long silences between them, then to madness and lastly to murder. The psy
chology of the situation is well interpreted and the gradual progress from mutual dissatisfaction and dislike to hatred and insanity are powerfully
cecorded.
The effect of the silence on the two consequent breeding of morbid fears
thus:
"To
men and
is
the
described
was added a new trouble the Fear This Fear was the joint child of the Great Cold and the Great Silence, and was born in the darkness of December when the sun
all this
of the North.
affected
dipped below the southern horizon for good. It them according to their natures. Weather-
fell prey to the grosser superstitions, and did his best to resurrect the spirits which slept in the forgotten graves. It was a fascinating thing, and
bee
came to him from out of the and snuggled into his blankets, and told him cold, of their toils and troubles ere they died. He shrank away from the clammy contact as they drew closer and twined their frozen limbs about him, and when they whispered in his ear of things
in his dreams they
to
come,
the
cabin
rang
with
his
frightened

shrieks.
157
Cuthfert did not understand,
for they
no longer spoke, and when thus awakened he in variably grabbed for his revolver. Then he would sit up in bed shivering nervously with the weapon Cuthfert trained on the unconscious dreamer. man going mad and so came to fear deemed the for his life." 1 The story necessarily comes to a
tragic conclusion.
i^The effect that the North exercised upon London was gloomy in the extreme. In all of his stories there are emphasized over and over again the re
call
of
man
life
between
elemental passions, the struggle and death and the deadening influence
to
of the white desolation.
The grandeur, the
so
lemnity, the somber beauty of the North left their impression along with the horror of its many hard
ships.
>
All in
all,
we are indebted
to
Jack London for
the vivid subjective delineation of a territory that presents Nature in her most moody and most terj
rible aspects.
i
From
"In
a Far Country.*
CHAPTER
XII
CONCLUSION
LOCALITY AS A FACTOR
illustrations
IN the previous chapters we have cited many to show how certain localities im
pressed the writers of the short story and how the authors utilized the material thus gathered in the
practice of exhaustive.
their
art.
The
field
vast to permit it. deavored to be intensive. Frankly, this has been a task of impressionistic criticism from a set view point: the importance of locality as a contributing factor to the author and his work. The method of treatment was to take a note a few of locality,
It was impossible to be of the investigation is too But we have therefore en
the
men and women who have

it
written short stories
to ascertain just the locality affected their work. Having done this we are prepared to see why locality has proved
it
about
and of
and endeavor
how
so helpful to
the development of the American and lastly why it has made it the most typically American form of our fiction. A writer in The Editor, which endeavors to be
short story
158
CONCLUSION
159
a magazine of technical interest to authors, says: "Remember that when once you have placed
your yarn in Kentucky it must ~breatlie Kentucky. Nor are Illinois towns the same as Hoosier towns. Moral standards vary; church customs vary; trades and trading vary a Kentucky court day is not the Northern Saturday; and we may well under
;
stand at the outset that the editor expects us, who strive to reflect the life we know, to be true
and accurate and sensible. 1 iXTo the short story, locality, therefore, contributes
the typical setting.
It gives to the short story the
touch of intimacy and reality. It differentiates the story at once from the mass of other stories, makes
it
characteristic
and
significant.
Take
New Eng
land away from Mrs. Freeman s stories or New Orleans from Mr. Cable s or the California of 49 from Bret Harte s and we rob them of their great
est
charm.
In each case mentioned the

itself
life of
the
locality
stamps
upon
its
own
hypotheses, imposes
the reader, sets up its own conditions and, as
a* re. ward,
produces an
effect peculiar to itself.
ters.
locality has a gallery of its own charac These readily become the principals in a short story because their crotchets and individual
Êach
mannerisms suggest
in
"The
plots,
Revolt of
Mother"
type like Adoniram by Mrs. Freeman
presents a problem of forcing a close-fisted, habiti The Editor, January, 1911, by R. G. Stott.
p. 5.
"The
Finer Touches/
160
TPIE
AMERICAN SHORT STORY
stunted man into an act of plain duty. Richard Darrel, the type of the faithful foreman, naturally shapes a story in which the central motif is self-
abnegation in behalf of his vocation.
character
like "Tennessee s Partner" in the story of that
name by Bret Harte becomes the incarnation of the camaraderie fostered in the rough days of the Argonauts. Each respective locality furnishes numerous types of this kind that embody in their
some human trait. Through characters that are distinctive, plots are suggested and situations evolved. But in addition
pejpsons the essence of
to this source the locality itself, irrespective of its
ations.
characters, furnishes interesting and dramatic situ Thus the loneliness and intense cold of
their
Northern camp drive to madness the two
The locality, therefore, cre city-bred occupants. ates the tragic situation in "In a Far
In one of 0. Henry
Archer"
Country."
s stories, "Mammon
and the
complication and denoue ment are brought about by a typical New York traffic blockade. The best example of this particu lar effect is to be found in the work of Hamlin Garland. Almost every one of the stories in "Main Travelled Roads" develops through the
the
entire
pe
culiar nature of the farmer s existence in the Mis

sissippi valley.
^fcven morality undergoes a change according

the section where
it is
to
to be applied.
sense of
Humanity
in the extreme
North demands the shoot-
CONCLUSION
161
ing of a comrade in distress as we saw in "An Arctic Death" by Jack London. Justice in the
West
the sudden
of the golden days was translated to mean and violent expulsion of all doubtful
*
characters from the limits of the town, e. g., "The Outcasts of Poker Flat. Courage in The Eevolt of
Mother"
of a husband
its
necessitated the defiance of gossip and s orders. Thus each locality makes
own
distinctive appeal to the individual.
He
acts according to his lights and the prescribed con vention of his society. When the two points of
view agree we get a typical study. When the indi vidual resists his environment we get a story no less typical but more dramatic.
To summarize, therefore, locality contributes to the short story typical settings, typical characters, typical situations and typical problems of con science. These, according to the nature of the ma
terial, help to produce stories in which the pathos, the tragedy, the comedy and the humor are typical. The old maid in Mrs. Freeman s "A New England
although her point of view and narrowness are universal, nevertheless gains in clearness and in verisimilitude by being depicted as a New Englander. Her entire life in her little restricted pro
Nun"
community bears out her point of view. The pathos is intensified by being sectional as well as universal because we are dealing with a human being in the concrete and not with an inhabitant of No Man s Land. For other examples of typical
vincial
162
THE AMERICAN SHOET STORY
pathos from the stories we have considered may be cited "Madame Delphine" by Cable where the problem of the mixture of the races leads to a
pathetic denouement; "The Star in the Valley" by Charles Egbert Craddock, where the mountain
girl of rough parentage finds her social status a bar to love; "The End of the Task" by Bruno Lessing in which the stifling monotony of the sweat shop creates mental, physical and moral disorders. In each of the cases cited, as well as in many others
that might be adduced,

ates the pathos.
it is
the locality that cre
For the typical humor there are stories of planta tion negro life by Joel Chandler Harris and Paul
Laurence Dunbar; the whimsical stories of 0. Henry with principal characters drawn from hosts
of metropolitan types; the stories of Bruno Les sing in which the Jewish mannerisms and mental crotchets evoke a laugh. Much of the work of the
New England short-story writers, somber as it is, in toto presents humorous individual characteriza tions as we have already seen.
Even
if
locality has
these were the only contributions that made to the American short story, they
would be considerable.
ceding chapters
We
have seen in the pre

the various set
how powerfully
problems of con science, typical pathos and humor were treated in the work of some of our greatest short story writ-
tings, local characters, situations,
CONCLUSION
ers.
163
There remain, however, a few other inferences to be drawn.

the time
Eliot
when
Dickens, Thackeray, George

their
and Bulwer Lytton were turning out
most successful work, the United States presented no native authors who ranked with them as novel
ists
in the public esteem.
Owing
to the
custom
of serial publication and the vogue of the circulat ing library, these writers composed long novels
elaborated far beyond the practice of to-day. The English periodicals were filled with installments of
these works of fiction
and
also with essays
by such
men
as
De Quincey and Leigh Hunt.
demand The public did it more profitable to Droduce the three-volume novel and the essay. XThe American periodical, however, was forced to resort to native talent and was at a loss for material. Local achievement in the novel was Nor did the American public desire es meager. The short story, therefore, sprang up be says. cause there was a need for it. The rapid growth in territorial extent and in population created a corresponding demand for reading matter. The supply of periodicals contin ued to increase. And as these magazines had to be filled with interesting material, the short story was
these reasons there was never a great for the short story in England. not want it and the writers found
For
drafted in to
fill
the gaps.
164

this field
In
our native authors had

their
little
or no
competition from
English Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot and Lytton wrote short stories only occasionally and then with a degree of clum
siness
rivals.
work
inartistic
and superfluity of detail which made and very much inferior to
their
their
novels.
vXrhus the short story became of necessity a form of fiction produced in America rather than in Eng
land.
In addition to the periodicals we find in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century a
great call for Gift Books and Literary Annuals of all kinds. These were elaborately designed and were filled with sentimental verse and short tales.
The moral
tale
and the
"hoax"
or
"surprise"
story were frequently found in their pages. latter type foreshadowed the technique of the
til
The
mod
ern story whose interest remains undiminished un

the last word is reached. Thus with a ready and waiting market, the sup ply was plentiful but the work was still crude both in selection of material and in treatment. "When Poe published "Berenice" in 1835 he es
tablished
structural
standard for
all
future
American work.
The unity
of impressionism
and
the use of suspense raised his stories immediately above the efforts of his contemporaries. But a native school of short story writers in spite of Poe and Irving and Hawthorne was not yet firmly
CONCLUSION
165
founded. They were the pioneers but the great horde of followers was to conae a little later.
:/*The first great impulse in that direction came with the appearance of "The Luck of Roaring
Here Camp" in The Overland Monthly (1868). was a story in which the material was taken from a picturesque American locality and shaped to meet the requirements of Poe s technique. It is said that Harte owed a great deal to Dickens. Perhaps this is so when we remember the English man s unique powers of vivid characterization and Harte s work in the same direction. But from the structural standpoint Harte s master and the master of them all was Edgar Allan Poe. He did not have the fault of Irving s discursiveness nor of Hawthorne s moralizing. Structurally his work
reached perfection, as
it is
understood to-day.
The sensational
success of Harte s
work revealed
a new source of rich material to the short story writers of our country. The keynote of the future had been struck. In all sections of the United States, as has been shown, there were men and women to follow in Harte s footsteps. "With Poe s
technique and the rich results of their own ob servation and experiences they reproduced their localities in all forms of fiction, especially in the short story.
unique American market had been created, that canons for successful
It is clear, thus far, that the
166
writing had been expounded by an American and that a distinct impulse to the ex ploitation of localities had been given by the work
short-story
of Bret Harte, a Californian. All the forces de termining the production of the short story being American, it is not straining a point to call it a typical American product.
But we can go still farther. We can call it the most typically American form of our fiction. The reasons for this are mainly psychological, and pe culiar to our country and its localities.
/ The settling, the cultivation and the

of the
immense
tract of territory
development under the stars
and
stripes
energetic.
We
have made of us a people feverishly are dynamic to a fault. Big cities
have sprung up by the tens and immense sky

scrapers of commerce by the hundreds. hand there is restlessness and change,
On
every
especially
Complete neighborhoods are wiped out, appear in totally strange and new guises. En terprises on a gigantic scale are constantly being conducted at a vast expenditure of money and nervous energy. Fortunes are still in the making,
to
change.
the social order
is
not yet fixed.
Great hopes
dazzle each individual, enticing him into renewed efforts. Unlike the countries of Europe, where
everything
his wealth
tive
is rigid, a man s place depending upon and ancestry rather than on his initia
and energy,
here,
keen, the fighting chance
though the competition is is extended to every man.
CONCLUSION
The poor farm boy may reasonably aspire
:
167
to
become
the president. Under these conditions there are created
numer
ous ephemeral phases of interest. They concern men, women, industries, occupations, enterprises,
politics,
economics, religion, art, music,
in fact all
that
is
makes our life a journey in which the scenery ever new from day to day. These fleeting con
ditions clamor to be recorded.

tics
Newspaper
is.
1
statis
Thus and Canada there are published twenty-four thousand, two hun dred forty-five (24,245) newspapers. The two countries that approach this number nearest are Great Britain with 9,500 and Germany with 8,049. Imagine what a seething cauldron of events this indicates and ask yourself whether the long novel
show how feverishly
active our Press
we
learn that in the United States
or the short story can beat take this transitory life
and reproduce
ity
essencei^xhrough its very brev the short story can take the fleeting emotions
its
life,
of our
too inconsequential for a complete novel
and incorporate them.

Besides the singular adaptability of the short stpry to record our rapid American progress we a reading public that, in the main, is unable
to concentrate
thought.
on a long and sustained train of There are thousands of people that read
class
newspapers and periodicals only. This readers wants something short, sharp and
i
of
decisive.
World
Almanac, 1911, p. 460.
Statistics of the Press.
168

much
short story, because of its brevity, because of in little is a favorite form of literature for minds weary with the day s work and craving a brief spell of excitement. That is why the ad
its
The
venture story, the story of plot and action rather than the static or psychological story is in such
demand by current magazines.

|,
^/The growth of our localities is identical with the growth of our country, and is therefore responsible for the development of our short story into what it is to-day. It is from the constant changes in the social, political and industrial life of our localities
that the short story derives its greatest impetus. They furnish the authors with material and create
the fiction hunger which craves for the short story. It is all a flowing circle of cause and effect invol ving the triplicate elements of locality, writer, reader. The locality spurs on the writer, the writer furnishes fiction to the reader, the reader
eates the locality. .ere The short story, therefore, as we have seen, through the influence of locality and for historical
and psychological reasons may lay claim to being considered the most typically American form of our
fiction.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A.
CRITICAL, HISTORICAL, BIOGRAPHICAL

The Short Story:
Macmillan.
Its
ALBRIGHT, EVELYN MAY.

ples
Princi
and Structure.
The Short Story: Technique. BASKEBVILL, WILLIAM MALONE. Joel Chandler Harris. Barbee & Smith, Nashville, Tenn. Is an appreciation of Harris. BENNETT, E. A. Fame and Fiction. "Concerning James Lane Allen." E. P. Button & Co. 1901. Contains a critique of James Lane Allen. BLANC, MME. THERESE. Questions Americans, Of special interest: Amerique d autrefois." Treats the Southern authors from a French standpoint.
"L
BUCKLE, THOMAS HENRY.

land.
History of Civilization in
2.
Eng
Vol.
1,
Chap.
Shows effect of climate on locality. CANBY, HENRY SEIDEL. The Short Story:
in English. Holt, 1902. Historical and critical.
Yale Studies
CLARK,
WARD.
Stewart
Edward White.
The Bookman,
July, 1910. Discusses the use of local color in short stories.
COURTNEY, WILLIAM LEONARD.

tion.
The Feminine Note in Fic
Discusses the work of Miss Wilkins. CUMMINS, MRS. ELLA STERLING. The Story
of the Files.
Pub. 1893.
California:
Literary History.
169
170
ESENWEIN,
BIBLIOGRAPHY
J. BEEG. Writing the Short Story. Hinds, Noble & Eldredge, 1909. The Short Story: Technique. FISKE. Provincial Types in American Fiction. Chautau-
qua
Society.
Treats of the provincial type in the American novel also touches on the short story.
GILDEB, JEANNETTE
sel
AND JOSEPH.
Authors at Home.
Cas-
&
Co.
Intimate biographical studies of authors in their home environment.
HABKINS, E. F.
Little Pilgrimages.
L.
C.
Page
&
Co.
Boston, 1902.
Contains an appreciation of James Lane Allen. HARTE, BRET. Comhill Magazine, July, 1899. Bret Harte on his own work. HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL. American Note Books.
ton Mifflin & Co. Gives the fragmentary hints that were the nucleus of
Hough-
many
JESSTJP
of Hawthorne s stories. AND CANBY. The Book of the Short
Appleton & Co. The Short St ory: Historical. LOCKLEY, FRED. Why They Come Back. vember, 1910.
Illustrates errors
Story.
D.
The Editor,
No
made by
writers of fiction due to
ignorance of locality. LOVETT, ROBERT MORSS. On
Hawthorne
Short
Story.
Reader, August, 1905. Analysis of Hawthorne s art.
PAGE,
THOMAS NELSON.
ner
s
The Old South.
Charles
Scrib-
Sons.
Treats of social conditions in the South before the war. PAGE, THOMAS NELSON. Social Life in Old Virginia. Gives a good picture of life in the old South.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
171
POE, EDGAR ALLAN. Review of Hawthorne s Tales. Gra ham s Magazine, 1835. This article states the underlying principles of shortstory technique.
POETER, SIDNEY
1910.
(O.
HENRY).
Current Literature, July,
The Edi "The Finer Touches." January, 1911. Contains advice concerning proper use of setting. WENDELL AND GREENOUGH. History of Literature in America. Scribner s, 1904.
tor,
Autobiographical. STOTT, EOSCOE GILMORE.
A good general history. 1001 PLACES TO SELL Mss.

N.
J.,
Editor Pub. Co.
Ridgewood,
1912.
Sets forth needs of current magazines in fiction, indi cating preferences of setting.
Valuable
bibliographies dealing with the following headings can be found in J. Berg Esenwein s "Writ ing the Short Story," Hinds, Noble & Eldredge:
1.
Appendix Appendix
Stories.
A:
B:
Collections
of
Short
Stories,
Sketches and Tales.

2.
P. 375.
One
Hundred
Representative
P. 382.
3.
(1) Books on the Short Story; Appendix G: (2) Books Referring to the Short Story; (3) Magazine Articles.
172
BIBLIOGRAPHY
B.
FICTION
(Arranged according to locality)
BROWN, ALICE.
(New England.)
Houghton Mifflin & Co. Meadow Grass. Houghton Mifflin & Co. CONNOLLY, JAMES B. (New England Fishing
Tiverton Tales.
Banks.)
Out
of Gloucester.
Scribner.
FREEMAN, MARY ELEANOR WILKINS. (New England.) A Humble Romance. Harper & Bros. A New England Nun. Harper & Bros. HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL. (New England.)
Twice Told Tales. Houghton Mifflin & Co. Mosses from an Old Manse. Houghton Mifflin JEWETT, SARAH ORNE. (New England.)
&
Co.
Tales of New England. Houghton Mifflin & Co. Strangers and Wayfarers. Houghton Mifflin & Co. STOWE, HARRIET BEECIIER. (New England.)
Oldtown Folks.
Houghton
Mifflin
&
Co.
Sam Lawson s Oldtown Mifflin & Co.

SINGMASTER, ELSIE.
"Big
Fireside
Stories.
Houghton
(The East:
Pennsylvania Germans.)
p.
Thursday."
Century, Vol. 71,
364.
County Seat." Atlantic, Vol. 101, p. 704. DEMING, PHILANDER. (New York State.) Adirondack Stories. (New York State.) FREDERIC, HAROLD. The Deserter and Other Stories. Lothrop. GARLAND, HAMLIN. (The Mississippi Valley, Wisconsin.)
"The
Main Travelled Roads.

WHITE, EDWARD STEWART.
Blazed-Trail Stories.
Stone
&
Kimball.
1893.
(Michigan,
Lumber
McClure, Phillips (South: General.) COOKE, JOHN ESTEN. Stories of the Old Dominion. Harper.
&
Section.) Co. 1904.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DUNBAR, PAUL LAURENCE
eral.)
173
Gen
(colored).
(The South:
In Old Plantation Days. SMITH, FRANCIS HOPKINSON.
Dodd, Mead & Co. 1903. (The South: General.)
Colonel Carter of Cartersville.
Houghton
Mifflin
&
Co.
STUART,
(The South: General.) The Golden Wedding and Other Tales. Harper.
RUTH MCENERYJ
JOHNSTON, RICHARD MALCOLM. (Georgia.) The Primes and their Neighbors. WOOLSON, CONSTANCE FENIMORE. (Georgia and Neighbor
ing States.)
Rodman the Keeper. (The South: ALLEN, JAMES LANE.
Kentucky
Cardinal.
Harper s,
Kentucky.) May- June,

1897.
1894;
Macmillan. Flute and Violin.
Harper & Bros.
(The South: Kentucky.) Fox, JOHN, JR. Hell fer Sartain and Other Stories. Scribner. CABLE, GEORGE W. (The South: Louisiana.) Old Creole Days. Scribner. KING, GRACE. (The South: Louisiana.) Tales of a Time and Place. Harper. (The South: Middle Georgia.) HARRIS^ JOEL CHANDLER.
Daddy
ton.
188 9. Jake, the Runaway. Century Co. Tales of the Home Folks in Peace and War. Hough-
Nights With Uncle Remus. Houghton. Northern Georgia. ) The South HARBEN, WILL N. "Two Birds With One Stone." Century, Vol. 48, p. 61.
(
:
"The
Sale of the
Mammoth
Western."
Century, Vol.
53, p. 74.
CRADDOCK, CHARLES EGBERT (MARY NOAILLES MURFREE). (The South: Tennessee.) In the Tennessee Mountains. Houghton Mifflin & Co.
1884.
The Bushwackers.
Herbert
S.
Stone
&
Co.
1899.
174
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BRADLEY, A. G. (Virginia.) Sketches from Old Virginia. Macmillan. PAGE, THOMAS NELSON. (The South: Virginia.)
In Ole Virginia.
fornia. )
Charles Scribner
Sons.
1892.
ATHERTON, MRS. GERTRUDE FRANKLIN.
(The West:
Cali
Before the Gringo Came. 1894, also published under the title of "The Splendid Idle Forties." Mac
millan.
FERNAU>,
CHESTER BAILEY.
)
(The West:
Century.
California Chi
nese.
The Cat and the Cherub.
HARTE, BRET. (The West: California, 49.) The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches. Houghton. From Sand Hill to Pine. Houghton. WHITE, EDWARD STEWART. (The West: General.) Stories of the Wild Life. McClure, Phillips & Co.
1904.
THANET, OCTAVE.
PORTER,
Stories of a Western
SIDNEY
(The West: Iowa.) Town. Scribner. (0. HENRY). (The West:
Texas and
Adjoining States.) Heart of the West. McClure Co. 1907. GLASS, MONTAGUE. (New York: Cloak and Suit Deal
ers.)
Potash and Perlmutter.

delphia, 1910.
Henry Altemus &
Co.
Phila
PORTER, SIDNEY (0. HENRY).

hensive. )
(New York
City:
Compre
The Four Million. Doubleday, Page & Co. 1909. The Voice of the City. Doubleday, Page & Co. 1909. The Trimmed Lamp. Doubleday, Page & Co. 1909.
Whirligigs.
Doubleday, Page
&
Co.
1910.
MATTHEWS, BRANDER.
(New York
Vignettes of Manhattan.
General.) City: Harper & Bros. 1894.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
KELLY, MYEA.
175
(New York:
Jewish School Children.)
McClure, Phillips & Co. 1904. Wards of Liberty. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1904. (New York: Jewish Life.) LESSING, BRUNO.
Little Citizens.
Children of Men. McClure, Phillips & Co. 1903. (New York: The Club-maa.) DAVIS, RICHARD HARDING. Van Bibber and Others. Harper & Bros. 1892.
(New York: The Slums.) Maggie. D. Appleton & Co. SULLIVAN, JAMES W. (New York: The Slums.) Tenement Tales of New York. Holt & Co.
CRANE, STEPHEN.
LONDON, JACK. (Alaska.) The Son of the Wolf. Grosset & Dunlap. New York. AUSTIN, WILLIAM. (Early American work showing traces
of influences of locality.)
Peter Rugg, the Missing Man.
New England
Galaxy:
September
10, 1824.
INDEX
Action in the short story, 19 James Lane, 84; power of landscape description, 88 ""American Note Books" by Hawthorne, 29 "Americanization of Schadrach Cohen" by Bruno Lessing, 130 "Among the Corn Rows" by Garland, love under difficul ties, 56 "Aunt Tempos Revenge" by Dunbar, 81 "Aunt Tempers Triumph" by Dunbar, study of faithful fam ily servant, 80 Austin, William, 32
Allen,
Siege" by Harris, the South in war time, 79 William Malone, on value of "Uncle Remus" 11 Bennet, E. A., concerning James Lane Allen, 88 "Between Rounds" by O. Henry, study of domestic infelic
"Baby
in the
Baskervill,
ity,
"Billy
116
by Edward Stewart White, 105 Therese, opinion of Page, 73 Blazed Trail Stories" by Edward Stewart White, 58 "Bold Deserter, The" by Harris, the South in war time, 79 Brainerd, Erastus, on Joel Chandler Harris, 74
s Tenderfoot"
Blanc,
Mme.
"Branch
Road,
The"
52
"Brickdust Row"
by Garland, study of a farmers wife,
by O. Henry, study of Coney Island. 123
Brown, Alice, 36
Buckle, 5
"Bushwackers"
by Craddock, 94
Business, effects on man, 11

Cable, George W., 64 California in fiction, 102 Canby, Estimate of Cable s use of local color, 68; Short Story English," 13; 22
"The
Chambers, Robert W., 148 Characterization in the Short story, 19; 159
177
178
"Christmas
INDEX
Present For a Lady" by Myra Kelly, pathos of school life, 131 Clark, Ward, on use of local color, 21 Climate, effects of, on man, 4 "Colonel s Nigger Dog by Harris, attitude of slave owner, 78 "Comedy of War" by Harris, the South in war time, 79 "Cosmopolite in a Cafe" by O. Henry, study of types,
"
cafe"
116
Courtney, W. L., on need of locality to modern short story, 23 Craddock, Charles Egbert, 89 Crane, Stephen, studies of slum life, 148 Creole types, portrayed by Cable, 64
Jake, the Runaway" spoiled family servant, 77 Davis, Richard Harding, 141
"Daddy
by Harris, study of the
De Quincey, 163
Dickens, 163
"Dooryards"
"Drifting
Down
by Alice Brown, study of inhabitants, 47 Lost Creek" by Craddock, study of moun
tain and town, 90 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 80
"Editor,
The"
on
"Why
They Come
Back,"
16
"Eleanore
Cuyler"
by Richard Harding Davis, study of a

Mounting"
settlement worker, 144

"Electioneerin
of
on Big Injun mountain politics, 95
by Craddock, study
Eliot, George, 163 133 "End of the Task, The" by Bruno Leasing, Esenwein, difference between short story arid novel, 15 "Experience of Hannah Prime" by Alice Brown, itudy of
a revival meeting, 48
Factory towns,
"Fall
life in, 10
of the
House
"Flute
and
Violin"
The"
of Usher" by Poe, 19 by James Lane Allen, 84
"Foreman,
by Edward Stewart White, lumber indus
try in fiction, 60 Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins, 36
-jjr*
IN HEX
Garland, Hamlin, 7; stories of Mississippi valley, 51; real ism of, 57 "Gatherer of Simples" by Miss Wilkins, study of a pecul iar avocation, 39 "Gentle Boy, The" by Hawthorne, 26 "Girl Who Got Rattled" by Edward Stewart White, 104 "Gift of the Magi" by O. Henry, study of flat dwellers, 115 Glass, Montague, overspecialization of, 141 "Gray Champion, The" by Hawthorne, 27 Green Door, The, by O. Henry, 124
Harris, Joel Chandler, 73; personal habits of, 74 Hart, Jerome A., list of Californian writers, 102 Harte, Bret, opinion concerning American short story, 13; as pioneer of the Western story, 97; faithfulness of his portrayals questioned, 102 Hawthorne, problems of conscience, 24; "The Gentle Boy," 26; as an observer of his locality, 29; significance of his work, 32 Hearn, Lafcadio, opinion of Cable s work, 67 "Hearts and Crosses" by O. Henry, 107 "Her first Appearance" by Richard Harding Davis, study of the club-man, 142 Howells, opinion of Garland s work, 57 "How Brother Parker Fell From Grace," 81 "How the Birds Talk" by Joel Chandler Harris, 75 "How to Fight the Devil" by Stowe, 34 Humor of different localities, 162 "Humble Romance? by Miss Wilkins, study of a kitchen drudge, 40 Hunt, Leigh, 163
"In
a Far
155
Country"
by Jack London, tragedy in the North,
Indian method of warfare, from work of Edward Stewart White, 105

Industries, 8 "In the Tennessee
Ot7
Mountains"
by Charles Egbert Craddock,
the Walls of meeting, 81 Irving, 2 Isolation, 2

"In
Jericho"
by Dunbar, study of a revival
180
"Jea*i-ah-Poquelin
INDEX
by Cable, heroic
self-sacrifice
of
the
Creole, 67
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 36

Kelly, Myra, 129 Kildare, Owen, studies of slum
"King
life,
148
Solomon
85
of Kentucky"
by Allen, study of a vagrant
Lefevre, Edwin, 148 "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" 2 Lessing, Bruno, estimate of, 140 "Life on the Mississippi," Twain, 8. "Little Annie s Ramble" by Hawthorne, 27 "Little Citizens" by Myra Kelly, 129
"Little
Matter of Real
life,
Estate"
bv Myra Kelly, humors of

of
school
"Local
129
Color, A Little" surprises, 114
by O. Henry, study
New York
Local color, use of, 21 London, Jack, 16; 150 Lovett, Robert Morss, "On Hawthorne s Short "Luck of Roaring Camp" by Harte, 98 Lytton, Bulwer, 163
Story,"
32
Mabie, Hamilton Wright, concerning James Lane Allen, 89 "Madame Delphme" by Cable, problem of mixture of the faces, 64 Magazines using Western stories, 98 "Main Travelled Roads," 7 "Mammon and the Archer" by O. Henry, study of a New York street blockade, 122 "Man about Town" by O. Henry, 119
Marken, 3
by Page, study of slave and master, 70 Red Death" by Poe, 18 "Meh Lady" by Page, study of a faithful slave, 69 "Men of Forty Mile" by Jack London, 154 Mining town of 49, as setting, 17 Mississippi valley, stories of by Hamlin Garland, 51 "Miss Tempy s Watchers" by Sarah Orne Jewett, study of gossip, 46
"Marse
Chan"
"Masque
of the
Morality, sense
of, in different localities,
160
INDEX
"Morris
181
of
and the Honorable Tim" by Myra Kelly, study narrow school officials, 132 Munro, Kirk, 16
Murfree,
Mary
Noailles, 89
Negro traits, as revealed in "Uncle Remus," 76 New England homestead, as setting, 17 "New England Nun" by Mary E. Wilkins, study
ness, 37
of
prim
New England Winter, 3 New York, influence of,

Occupations, 9
O. Henry, 11; use of an essential setting, 20: as a cos mopolite, 106; as photographer of New York life, 113; about himself, 114; estimate of, 126 "Old Creole Days" by Cable, 64 "Old Sledge at the Settlemmt" by Craddock, study of the
"Oldtown Folks"
gambler dominant, 92 by Stowe, 32 "Outcasts of Poker Flat" by Harte, 20 100 "Out of His Orbit" by Bruno Lessing, 138
;
Page,
Thomas Nelson, 69
of Jolton s
Ridge"
"Panther
by Craddock, study
of illicit
distilling, 95
"Peter
Rugg"
by William Austin, 32
Plot structure, 160

Poe,
Edgar Allan, romances of, 1; use of locality by, 17; canon of short story writing, 14 and Perlmutter" by Montague Glass, 141 "Posson Jone* by Cable, study of a Creole rogue, 66 Problems of conscience, Hawthorne, 24
"Potash
"
Puritan, conscience
of,
in
modern
setting, 37
"Rappaccini s Daughter"
"Revolt
of
Mother"
by Hawthorne, 31 by Miss Wilkins, study
of straiaed
do
mestic relations, 41 "Rift in the Cloud" by Bruno Lessing, 135

"Rill
"River
from the Town Pump" by Hawthorne, 27 Boss, The" by Edward Stewart White, lumber
fiction,
fiction,
in
dustry in
"Riverman,
63
The"
dustry in
by Edward Stewart White, lumber in 59
182
"Sam
INDEX
Lawson s Oldtown Fireside Stories" by Stowe, 33 The" by Edward Stewart White, lumber industry
Marriage"
"Sealer,
in fiction, 61
"Second
"Service
of Love,
A"
by Alice Brown, study of habit, 49 by O. Henry, study of New York
Bohemians, 119
"Short
Setting of the short story, 159 Story in English" by Canby, 22
"Sights
"Skylight
from a Steeple" by Hawthorne, 37 Room, The" by 0. Henry, study room lodgers, 118
Life Before the
War,"
of
furnished
"Social
"Son
essay by Page, 72 by Jack London, 150; 152 South, in ante-bellum days, as setting, 17; old regime
of the Wolf,
;
The"
in
the cotton fields of, 9 "South, The Old" by Page, 72 "Star in the Valley, The" by Craddock, study of social dif ferences, 93 Stott, R. G., on truth to setting, 159 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 32 82 "Supper by Proxy" by Dunbar, negro comedy, "Swallow Tailer for Two, by Bruno Lessing, 137
the, 70
A"
"Telemachus, Friend"
"Tennessee s Partner"
by O. Henry, 110 by Harte, study of elemental friend
ship, 101
Thackeray, 163
"Toll-Gatherer s
Day"
by Hawthorne, 27
Topography,
effects of, 6
Travel, as an aid to the author, 16
82 "Trouble about Sophiny" by Dunbar, negro comedy, Twain, Mark, 7 of a faith "Two Gentlemen of Kentucky" by Allen, study ful slave, 86
"Uncle Remus"
"Unconverted"
by Harris, study of negro traits, 74 a religious prob by Bruno Lessing, study of
"Unfinished
"Up
lem, 136 of department Story, An" by O. Henry, study store problems, 120 the Coulee" by Hamlin Garland, disruption in fam
ily,
54
"Van
Bibber s Man Servant" by Richard Harding Davis, study of a valet, 146
INDEX
Verne, romances
"Village
183
of, 1
Uncle, The" by Hawthorne, 27 "Voice of the City, The" by O. Henry, meaning of a city s discords, 124
Wells, romances of, 1 Wendell and Greenough,

ica,"
"History
of Literature in
Amer
25
far, 9
West, the
story, vogue of, 97 Wetherill, J. K., estimate of Cable s
Western
68 White,
"White
work
in local fiction,
Edward Stewart,
Heron"
11; 58
by Sarah Orne Jewett, isolation with na

The"
"White
ture, 45 Silence,
"Winter
Courtship, quaint types, 44
A"
by Jack London, 150 by Sarah Orne Jewett, study of
Zangwill, convincing writer of Jewish fiction, 133
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THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY

ELIAS LIEBERMAN, PH.D.

THE EDITOR RIDGEWOOD, NEW JERSEY

THE EDITOR COMPANY

critics are less

crowded realism of the manifold

City. of vivid cross-sections of the life of particular lo

Consciously or unconsciously, therefore, fiction has taken the form of special

studies of the reaction between individual char

This interest of locality has

thus far the distinctive contribution of

extension, has so far attracted

immense few serious students. and who of us is not

constantly searching for new ma public is ever hungry and he must

His stock-in-trade must be constantly He draws from his own experiences

needs without a profound

get a great deal of what

given a unique setting,

New York, in the West of New England village or on a Southern

It is the purpose of this book to investigate the

influence which our

the Mississippi valley; the

the fictional use of these lo

reader can get some notion of the pos-

in territory not included.

and South American have not been considered. Republics

hoped that the student of American

should prove a valuable resume and should hint

upon the American short

story. realizing sense of its shortcomings

yet with a feeling that

FORCES IN DETERMINING LOCALITIES AND TYPES OF MEN AND WOMEN

THE POINT OF CONTACT BETWEEN THE SHORT

THE DAYS THAT ARE NO MORE

from Cable, Page,

The work of Stewart Edward The work of 0. Henry.

Critical, Historical, Biographical

Fiction (arranged according to locality)

THE AMERICAN SHORT

FORCES IN DETERMINING LOCALITIES AND TYPES OF

MEN AND WOMEN

Men and women,

and habits of thinking and

THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY

It is psychologically true that

currents in a great bay, cross one modifying, though sometimes

world amidst the unceasing dins of the

the individual actor shows all his heroic strength

a god battling against great odds; sometimes mere

^Let us examine some

of the most important forces

that determine localities and therefore types of

ington Irving, picturing the seclusion of the place

on the inhabitants, relates how old

LOCALITIES AND TYPES

wooden shoon, the stomachers and quaint head

the cause was not commercial.

in the same way, an occasional

ways when out

of the beaten path of his

THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY

and the feuds